Doing.THiS.&.Doing.THaT

Have been doing too many things for the past few weeks both at home and at work. Can't really focus well on each of them but trying very hard to cope.

Paladin Has Left The Castle!
Finally, got the long awaited Paladin 0.8.6 out of the gate. Did not really give it much attention after the previous release. Just some minor features and bug fixes. Learnt one thing though, reading embedded resource files through ResourceManager is slow! It negated my performance boost in my previous release. Luckily, I managed to fix it.

Work on 0.8.7 has begun. Have dreamt up some wild ideas and will incorporate them soon. I think the BEWizard architecture needs rework. Currently, I don't think it is very extensible. Also not sure if I should start porting it to .NET 2.0. It is tough working on it alone, especially when the others are just 'watching' ;)

I was told that a Singaporean company is evaluating Paladin and may consider using it for their projects. Thanks to one of my friends who presented it to his boss.

Database Overloaded!
Somehow, my attention is drawn to RDBMS nowadays. Been reading up on Oracle for my unit this semester. *Collected 4 more books from my college*. One thing I like about Oracle is Natural Joins. Makes things very clean. Example:

SELECT * FROM Customers C
NATURAL JOIN Orders O
NATURAL JOIN OrderItems I
WHERE C.CustomerID = 888

Also, the easy RENAME OldTable TO NewTable function. It is quite convenient.

But SQL Server must be quite jealous of me looking at Oracle nowadays ;) So last week, SQL Server 2005 Beta 2 was released to grab my attention (and indeed it did). It now comes with a powerful integrated management interface dubbed as SQL Server Management Studio. Combining Query Analyzer, Enterprise Manager, Profiler and all the SQL Server Tools into one manageable desktop interface at the DBA's fingertips! My fingertips!!! *Snort* *Snort*

Besides UI enhancements and the more professional look, it also boast of CLR Integration - meaning now you can write stored procedures in C#, VB.NET or any .NET languages. One of the cool (and easy) SQL enhancements I picked up is Synonyms. Oracle has it for a long time and now, I'm glad SQL Server has it too. Basically it looks like this:

CREATE SYNONYM Customers
FOR Acme.Retail.Customers

SELECT * FROM Customers

Something for you to rename long winded table names to a simple name. Very handy for linked servers. Another enhancement I picked up is common table expression (CTE). It is something like this:

WITH DirReps(ManagerID, DirectReports)
AS (
SELECT ManagerID, COUNT(*) FROM
HumanResources.Employee AS e
WHERE ManagerID IS NOT NULL
GROUP BY ManagerID
)

I ripped that example from the new SQL Books Online. Basically, it is a feature that allows you to create temporary named tables instead of those # here # there tables.

There is also the PIVOT and UNPIVOT commands that are used for tabular reports. This was something that I have been complaining for years being an ex-SAS developer. I'm glad that SQL Server has it now. With these commands, you can convert columns to rows and rows to columns.

There are tonnes of enhancements but I only have limited time to look at it. Analysis Services seemed to have improved with an all new Business Intelligence Development Studio. There is also AMO and AMOMD.NET for MDX lovers and a new DMX language for Data Mining purposes. Will post more about when I get to it.

PS: I also picked these up while reading on ASP.NET 2.0 :
- Migrating from ASP.NET 1.x to ASP.NET 2.0
- Data Access in ASP.NET 2.0