Randquist Rants » sql

sp_findtext

CobyR — Wed, 17 Jan 2007 23:37:50 +0000

When in MS SQL server and you need to find some text in a stored proc, but you have 100′s of them, what do you do?

Came accross sp_findtext when searching for an issue today. I was doing maintenance on an app I hadn’t looked at in over 18 months.

sp_findtext

sp_who, sp_who2, and sp_who_3

CobyR — Sun, 17 Sep 2006 18:36:45 +0000

I have used sp_who and sp_who2 frequently as a DBA on Microsoft SQL servers. I came across sp_who3 a year or so ago, and have used it since. It’s a handy sproc to have when working on MS SQL 2000.

sp_who_3 : an enhanced and efficient version of sp_who

It’s always the little things…

CobyR — Fri, 14 Jul 2006 06:19:38 +0000

I’m getting over more hurdles in Ruby. The amount of material on the web regarding Ruby and RoR is great, but some of the simplest things seem to take me the longest to figure out.

Using Ruby to import data from some Excel spreadsheets on Windows, things are going great the win32ole automation is straightforward, and well documented in “Programming Ruby” by Dave Thomas (The Pragmatic Programmer‘s Guide). So naturally one of the columns is a client name column, and invariably I hit McSweeny’s Auto Body Shop. Syntax error with SQL.

Ok easy enough I just need to escape the apostrophe. Hmm.. how? After a bunch of researching, and this is one of those forehead thumpers, Regular expressions finally dawned on me. So after 20 minutes of kicking around the internet, I thought “oh, yea, why not use regex”. This is what I came up with:

@clientName.gsub!(/'/,"''")

Time to brush up on my regular expressions, since they are so readily available in Ruby.

The next simple thing… user picks a month and a year on which some particular processing will now take place. Quickest way to convert 10 into October?

I finally came up with the following, not terribly happy with it, but it works for the moment.

@month = @params['month'] @year = @params['year']

@tmpDate = ParseDate.parsedate(@month + "/1/" + @year) @monthName = Time.local(*@tmpDate).strftime("%B")

But there has to be a more obvious way that I am not seeing.

New Server

CobyR — Sun, 25 Jun 2006 04:37:45 +0000

I left Vehix.com in October of 2005, however due to my four years there, and the good relationships I have had with many people there, I have continued to host my site on one of the play servers used by the technology team. That has all ended, I now have my own server up and running and am migrating things over to the new box.

The new server is running Windows 2003. Next will be a Linux server.

Today I successfully installed and configured:

Apache 2.0.58
PHP 5.1.4
MySQL 5.0
hMailServer
RoundCube Webmail Client
MS SQL 2000
IIS 6.0

I was able to reinstall WordPress, restore the mySQL database, and my blog is now up and running on the new server.

I decided to upgrade the version of DNN I was using for my business site. I’m playing with DNN4 now, trying to decide if I want to continue with DNN. That’s tomorrows task.