DatabaseJournal.com Staff

Book Review: Access 2002 Developer’s Handbook Suffice it to say that the Access Developer’s Handbook (ADH) is legendary. It seems like not a week goes by at the comp.databases.ms-access newsgroup where someone with a question isn’t directed to the ADH. Invariably, the handbook thoroughly and completely answers the question, usually with a comprehensive explanation including […]

This small function from Subhan Munshi converts a submitted string to sentence case. CREATE FUNCTION fn_ToSentenceCase (@inputstr as varchar(1000)) RETURNS varchar(1000) AS BEGIN –Author: Subhan Munshi declare @Upper as char(1) declare @len as int declare @count as int declare @flag bit declare @resultstr varchar(100) set @len = len(@inputstr) set @count = 2 set @resultstr = […]

What’s in your toolbox? There was a time, not that long ago, that the only 3rd-party tool I used on a regular basis was SPEED Ferret 3.0, a well known global search and replace add-in for Access 97. Over the years, I’ve picked up a few others, but SPEED Ferret is still the first and […]

Here’s some SQL code from Eli Leiba that will all you to compare two tables — say, table A and table B — to determine if their content is the same. Assuming that A and B have the same structure, here’s how it works: First, from set theory, recall that: If ((|A| = |B|) && […]

Now for some more functions that will help you get the data you want out of the database. And finally, we will live dangerously and start deleting stuff. What Are Aggregate Functions? Wouldn’t it be great if SQL provided you with some basic functions for averaging, counting or finding the largest or smallest number in […]

Remember, the skills that you have learned here are only the tip of the iceberg. There are many more concepts and helpful tools just waiting for you out there. The next best step in learning how to work with databases is to actually create one yourself. Take some time and investigate the databases that are […]

Alright, you can get your data back out now. Let’s look at some ways to make your DBMS do some extra work for you by sorting, grouping and narrowing down choices. Some more about WHERE In Part 4 you learned about using WHERE to filter your data. What if you have a much more complex […]

This simple script from Ramunas Balukonis is useful when you need to log in to a file from SQL server. The script opens a file and adds user-specified information to that file. Usage: dbo.append_log (@file_name VARCHAR(255) /* file2appaned*/, @msg VARCHAR(8000) /* msg2log */) You need to set permission on master..OACreate, master..OADestroy, master..GetErrorInfo, master..sp_OAMethod xps to […]

Alright, we’re making some progress now. You have a database and you’ve created some tables. What about putting some data into the tables? What is an INSERT statement? I’m sure that it’s not hard to guess what the INSERT statement does. However, how it works will probably need a little explanation. In order to use […]

What is a SELECT statement? So, what does SELECT do? Very simply, it tells the DBMS that you want to get some data out of the database. So, how does it work? SELECT can range from very simple to painfully complex. With SELECT there are a whole host of different options available to you that […]

Using a Script to Kill Processes in SQL Introduction Backing up and restoring databases is part of every administrator’s job. While performing backups, a number of methods can be used to save time. If a database needs to be moved from one server to another, a backup on one server and a restore on another […]

Moving Segments with INITIAL Extents Different to the LMT’s UNIFORM Extent Size So you’ve just migrated your Oracle8i databases in which all your various sized segments reside (which incidentally were stored in the single “USERS” Tablespace) and now you want to place them in appropriately sized Locally-Managed Tablespaces (LMT’s). Here is a brief guide to […]