In SQL Server text can be stored in two formats; either as 1 byte characters using a specified code page (char and varchar) or 2 byte Unicode characters (nchar and nvarchar). But it’s always bugged me that while nvarchar uses two bytes per character, the Unicode standard can use up to 6 hexidecimal digits per [...]
Monthly Archives: March 2008
Simple things of NULL
Sunday, March 30, 2008
Some quick playing with NULL values and some inline comparison functions in SQL Server 2005.
ISNULL returns the value of the second expression if the first expression evaluates to null, otherwise the value of the first expression is returned. COALESCE returns the first non null value from a list of expressions, otherwise returns null. NULLIF [...]
Hands off SA, sort of
Sunday, March 30, 2008
It’s possible to Deny Connect permission to an Endpoint in SQL Server 2005. So I wondered if this would be a way disable the ’sa’ server account.
The sa account is disabled if the server only supports Windows security accounts, but is enabled if Mixed accounts are supported. Of course the recommendations are to use [...]
The coolest thing I saw today.
Wednesday, March 26, 2008
Whilst watching a MySQL webinare they discussed the new (as in beta new) MySQL Proxy. Today they talked about using the proxy to present a single, virtual, database they may be physically implemented using a cluster for some tables, master-slave mirroring for others and even sharding the whole thing.
As a quick example the catalog [...]
SQL 2005 SOAP Endpoint Security and its problems
Saturday, March 22, 2008
Again with the security, this time while workout out how SOAP HTTP Endpoints work and I have two issues with it.
First, its only possible to change the execution context of the call when it reaches the target stored procure or function and only then by defining the object using ‘Execute As’. By this time the [...]