There is many times where we might want to explicitly control the connections to an instance of SQL Server and more specifically to a database. Such scenarios might include: A restore procedure of a backup set which cannot complete as there are still active connections to the specific database. You need to drop a database … Read more…
SQL Server 2008 Service Pack 1 was just released yesterday (April 7, 2009). Along with the fixes for known bugs, this Service Pack also adds some new functionality to SQL Server 2008 mainly from the DBA’s perspective. What’s new Microsoft has added new functionality to SQL Server with this service pack. The main new features … Read more…
This is the first of a series of posts dedicated to the ADO .NET Entity Framework. The purpose of these posts is to try to provide the necessary knowledge on what exactly is the Entity Framework, how can be used and how can help for an easier, faster and more efficient Data Access experience with … Read more…
Today I have received a congratulation email from Microsoft announcing that I have been presented with the Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) Award for SQL Server! I am very happy about this award and I really feel honored. ——————————————————————————— Dear Artemakis Artemiou, Congratulations! We are pleased to present you with the 2009 Microsoft® MVP Award! … Read more…
This article, in an introduction to ADO .NET Entity Framework, Entity Data Model and gives an overview of this great technology. The Problem ADO .NET Entity Framework Solves During the development cycle of a database application, the developer may face issues having to do with the fact that the logical (relational) and related infrastructure … Read more…
I was recently asked to review one of the products of uCertify company. uCertify provides IT certification preparation PrepKits for a large number of vendors. To this end, I was given a copy of PrepKit 070-443 which is for the corresponding Microsoft Exam 70-443: PRO: Designing a Database Server Infrastructure by Using Microsoft SQL Server … Read more…
About the Error Message: “Exclusive access could not be obtained because the database is in use” A very neat feature of SQL Server is the way it lets the DBA to control connections. To this end, you can explicitly control connections with specific commands and methods. Even though this is not usually needed, there are … Read more…
Today I have officially received the role of the INETA Country Leader for Cyprus. It was an honour for me to receive this role as it will allow me to further promote the .NET community activity in Cyprus. The main responsibility of this role is to supervise INETA User Groups in Cyprus and to promote … Read more…
In this article, we will be discussing about manipulating EXCEL 97-2003 worksheets with the OPENROWSET command. About the OPENROWSET Command SQL Server provides among other the neat feature of the OPENROWSET command. OPENROWSET allows establishing ad hoc connections using OLE DB. It actually allows one-time access to remote data from an OLE DB data source. If … Read more…
In this article, we will be discussing about the “A transport-level error has occurred when sending the request to the server” error message, you might get in SQL Server. This article’s purpose is to explain the above connectivity error and ways of resolving it. Why you might get the “transport-level” error in SQL Server … Read more…
Today we had our company presentation regarding the financial results of the year 2008. One of the sessions of this meeting were the Employee Awards for 2008. To my pleasant surprise I have received the Leadership Award for the year 2008 “in recognition of accomplishments far exceeding company expectations” and for gaining and applying technical … Read more…
In this article, we will be discussing about the “Divide by zero error encountered” error message in SQL Server. About the “Divide by zero error encountered” error message Well, as the error message says, whenever we have a division within a SQL query and the denominator has the value of zero (0) we get this … Read more…
Well, another successful event took place yesterday in another one of our regular community events of the Cyprus .NET User Group. About the Event This time the topic was ASP .NET AJAX. Our special guest speaker was Karl Davies-Barrett, Developer Platform Evangelist (Microsoft Malta/Cyprus). AJAX stands for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML. It allows the … Read more…
There are many times were we need to handle NULL and “empty” values in SQL Server. Note however, that there is a difference between a NULL and an “empty” value. In this example we will examine the above cases and ways of handling it, when developing data processes in SQL Server. Create a Sample … Read more…
There are many times where a query may result to the following error: String or binary data would be truncated. The statement has been terminated. We will go through a simple example for explaining this behavior. Reproducing the “String or binary data would be truncated” error Creating the Sample Table Consider the following table: CREATE TABLE … Read more…