In my June 21 commentary, I discussed SQL Server 2000 Service Pack 1 (SP1) and shared some thoughts about service packs in general. I heard from many readers who disagreed with my advice. Crafty consultants never admit they were wrong. Let's just...
I'm a devoted reader of Itzik Ben-Gan's T-SQL Black Belt column, but the following passage from "Sorting Techniques" (April 2001) confused me: "Note that the Publishers table is very small. If the table were bigger, the optimizer might choose not...
Congratulations to Emmanuel Nanchen, analyst/programmer at Manpower Switzerland, and Vishal Gupta, a data architect and DBA at Nexgenix in Irvine, California. Emmanuel won first prize of $100 for the best solution to the July Reader Challenge...
It's here! In November 2000, we released Beta 1 of .NET Framework, and on June 20, we made Beta 2 publicly available. If you attended TechEd in Atlanta, you received both Visual Studio.NET and the .NET Framework. Those who weren't able to attend...
With Microsoft's .NET technology platforms and XML Web services, you can create a seamless information environment that lets users stay connected to their information wirelessly from any mobile device. Whether the data users need is on the...
In my last column, I discussed Microsoft's newest SAP Sales and Distribution (SD) Standard Application Benchmark score, in which a 32-CPU Unisys ES7000 running SQL Server 2000 and Windows 2000 outperformed a 64-CPU Sun ES10000 running Oracle. I...
Dump the UNIX tax? That's what Unisys recommended when the company announced its newest SQL Server benchmark results on June 12. SQL Server crossed an important threshold on the SAP Sales and Distribution (SD) Standard Application Benchmark when...
In "The WAP Traffic Application," I explained how I created a Wireless Markup Language (WML) traffic application that lets you render the current traffic speeds for San Diego on any Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) device and HTML browser. In...
In my May 29 column, I introduced an XML reader, the XmlTextReader class. In .NET, you can use the XmlTextReader class as a lightweight, but not less-effective, alternative to XML Document Object Model (XMLDOM) classes. XML readers let you move...
From a .NET perspective, Microsoft TechEd 2001 in Atlanta was exciting. On Monday morning, in his keynote address, Paul Flessner, senior vice president for .NET Enterprise Servers, made several major product announcements. First, he announced...