Tuesday, May 22, 2007

DTS -- My learnings today

Today I wanted to schedule a data update process to be processed every month for the table I created using DTS last month.

I wanted to populate a brand new database from an exisitng database. I thought I would just schedule a package with a few SQL queries to populate the different tables in the new database. But before I proceededI wantedto find out an efficient and best way to do it.

So I posted my questions in two forums. This is what I found out from the experts:

Before you decide on setting up the DTS package there are several aspects to consider.

Do you want to recover the database from a backup when something goes wrong?
Do you want to just reload everything when something fails?
Do you want to save logging information so that you can recover the database?

Based on the answers to these questions, the best way to create a DTS package for my scenario is to create the tables with the structure and then create the DTS package using many Data Driven Query Tasks that contains the SQL statemetns of select, Insert and Update depending on whatever the case may be.

DTS is an excellent tool to schedule population of data into a database.

Monday, May 21, 2007

SQL query to get Month Name for today

I wanted to insert the month name of the current date into a table using a SQL query.

I first thought that I could achieve this by simply using the monthname function. But when I typed that in the SQL Query analyser, the error made me realise that it is not that easy to get the result I want.

So in the end here is what I came up with:


select datename(month, getdate())+'-'+ convert(varchar,year(getdate())) as Month_

Sunday, May 20, 2007

Automating the .NET Framework download and installation

Here's a script that automates the download and installation of the .NET 2.0 Framework prior to installing a .NET application, using all free tools including InnoSetup. If .NET is not installed on the target computer, then this script goes out and downloads it, showing a progress meter along the way, and then installs it on the target machine.



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Thursday, May 17, 2007

Five ways to defeat blog trolls and cyberstalkers

Online harassment is going gangbusters in the blogosphere. With 70 million blogs in existence today there are a lot of nut jobs out there. From cyberstalkers and trolls to flamers and kooks, it's only a matter of time before some of them find their way to your blog. Here are five ways to make sure you don't become a victim.



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Wednesday, May 16, 2007

Top 17 Free Webmaster tools

A list of 17 Free webmaster tools. This list includes several HTML and CSS tools, SEO tools such as backlink checker, keyword density, and several other useful miscellaneous tools.



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Thursday, May 10, 2007

Toolbox for Web Developers/Programmers (tlbox.com)

Add tools to your tool box that you can refer back to. Useful website listings for HTML, PHP, CSS, Images, Tutorials, Widgets, etc. Great links.



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Wednesday, May 09, 2007

What's Wrong With My Blog? Guide to common pitfalls & mistakes in blogging

Creating a blog is easy - but alas, building a readership is somewhat more difficult. So where do nascent bloggers most commonly go wrong?



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Thursday, May 03, 2007

Dramatic Black and White photos using Photoshop

Converting photos from color to black and white can be done in a variety of ways in photoshop. The easiest way is just to convert your image to grayscale, but this usually leaves you with a rather flat and dull looking image. This article will show you how to convert color photos to dramatic looking black and white photographs in photoshop.



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Deploy the Azure Machine Learning Model

In the previous post I have discussed how to create an Azure Machine Model.  In this post I will be discussing how to Deploy this model. Pre...