The following snippet allows you to find all stored procedures containing a specific word or words. I found it to be very helpful to find all references to a table I needed to remove from my database. I order not to break functionality I scanned all procs for references and changed or removed them. Here is the code:

And here’s a slightly less efficient alternative. It uses SQL-Server 2008′s OBJECT_DEFINITION() function:

A colleague of mine found this little gem of a query (sorry, don’t know the original author). It finds the 20 most expensive queries executed on a SQL server instance, sorted by execution time. CPU load is also returned by the query. Here it is:

• Walking on water and developing software from a specification are easy if both are frozen.
  – Edward V. Berard
• Hofstadter’s Law:
  It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law.
• Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it.
  – Brian Kernighan
• Some people, when confronted with a problem, think “I know, I’ll use regular expressions.” Now they have two problems.
  – Jamie Zawinski
• Linux is only free if your time has no value.
  – Jamie Zawinski
• It works on my machine.
  – Anonymous
• It worked yesterday.
  – Anonymous
• If debugging is the process of removing software bugs, then programming must be the process of putting them in.
  – Edsger Dijkstra
• A computer lets you make more mistakes faster than any other invention in human history, with the possible exceptions of handguns and tequila.
  – Mitch Ratcliffe
• Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.
  – Antoine de Saint Exupéry
• Perl – The only language that looks the same before and after RSA encryption.
  – Keith Bostic
• The trouble with programmers is that you can never tell what a programmer is doing until it’s too late.
  – Seymour Cray
• Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight.
  – Bill Gates

Follow the link…

http://www.devcurry.com/2010/07/10-free-tools-to-loadstress-test-your.html

It’s a documented bug in SQL server that causes above error message. The error is triggered by nested comment blocks, like this example:

All very well, it’s a documented bug so it shouldn’t be a problem. Microsoft’s solution is plain and effective: don’t use nested comment blocks.

But what if, like in my case, you created the trigger using SQL server 2000′s Enterprise Manager (which does not suffer from the bug) and you’re trying to open the trigger much later using Microsoft’s SQL Server Management Studio? The trigger will fail to open and you’re pretty well stuck.

What is needed now is a way to get to the trigger without opening it directly in the Management Studio. Luckily SQL Server stores all its tables, views, stored procedures and triggers in the database itself. So to get to the trigger we need to know where it is stored.

In this post I described how to display a list of tables, views or other user objects from SQL Server. If we expand the query a little it allows us to get to the contents of the trigger we need:

As you can see the contents of triggers is stored in the SYSCOMMENTS table. Note that longer functions, triggers and stored procedures may have multiple entries with the same name in SYSCOMMENTS. You may have to concatenate the text fields of multiple records together to get the complete contents of your function. I found the best way is create a small loop and PRINT the results instead of outputting them to the default grid.

There are a few ways to retrieve the table sizes (both row count and size in bytes) in SQL server. The simplest is the sp_spaceused stored procedure which takes a table name as argument:

This is all fine, but what if you want to display info about a dozen or more tables? The undocumenten stored procedure sp_MSforeachtable might proof useful here:

This statement executes the sp_spaceused sp for every table in the connected database. This actually gets the information we want, albeit not in a very readable form. Because the sp is execute for each table, we get a result set for every table. If we want to do some filtering and sorting we’re out of luck here. So we need something more flexible.

The following routine executes the sp_spaceused sp for each table again, but the results are aggregated into a temporary table. Now we get a nice result set that we can actually work with. Here’s the code:

On my company laptop I have a network drive attached which is not always available. Recently I got annoyed about files not always being there so I decided to disconnect the company drive all together. After restarting I then got EXPLORE.EXE server execution failed and the Windows Explorer no longer started.

Turns out I had some registry settings pointing to my company drive. Changing them to local paths solved my problem. These are the keys in question:

The usual way to call web service is by using POST requests. But sometimes GET requests are required. To make .NET web services accept their parameters from GET requests, add a ScriptMethod attribute to your web service routine.

First add some libraries:
C#

Visual Basic

Then decorate your web service method:
C#:

Visual Basic:

Finally you need to tell your application to accept GET requests in your web.config:

One note of warning: GET requests may be easier to hack because the querystring is visible to the user. Use it wisely. On the other hand, POST requests can be tampered with just as well, don’t expect them to be saver!

Easy peasy, use the sp_rename stored procedure:

In my recent CakePHP application I use some custom SQL queries that I fire at the database using the $model->query($sql) syntax. Works great, until you have an error in your $sql. I tried the obvious error handling with try … catch:

But the CakePHP Debugger class already catches the error and does it’s handling; which is writing the error to the browser. In my case I need to act upon an error.

After some trial and error (including hacking the core Cake files, which is really dirty) I came up with this: the Cake Debugger class set an error handler using set_error_handler('someErrorHandlingRoutine'). So i made my own error handing routine, borrowing some from the Debugger class:

What it does is simple and ellegant; throw an exception. Now my $model->query code can be wrapped in a try…catch block and if an exception happens I can act on it.

As you can see I placed my error handler in the app_controller.php. This way it’s easily accessible from all my controllers.

Now before calling $model->query($sql) I set my custom error handler:

Here’s an easy, single line statement to check if a database exists in the current SQL-server instance:

Hi all, this is my first post from my iPhone. I’m using the WordPress 2.0 iPhone app (make sure XML-RPC is enabled in your WordPress back-end). Even adding images from the iPhone Camera Roll is easy peasy.

Computing the hash value of a file is quite strait forward. I use the routine below. It opens the file, specifies the hash-algorithm to use and returns the hash of the file. If you rather use MD5 hashes, just change hashAlgorithm into MD5CryptoServiceProvider.

SHA1 hashes typically produce 160-bit (20 bytes) messages (16 bytes for MD5). If you want to store the hash value in a database table, make sure the field is wide enough to prevent data from getting truncated. By default the ComputeHash method returns the bytes separated by a hyphen (-). To save space I opted to remove these.

Here’s a very useful tool: http://www.iconfinder.net/

It allows you to search for icon, and it returns a lot of high quality images. Recommended!

Here’s a script to retrieve the name of the currently running SQL Server instance:

Resultset: