A few years ago I was speaking at a conference in Raleigh, NC where Ted Neward and I found a fun way to promote a Java vs. .NET debate that was planned one evening. We stood in the middle of a crowd during one of the breaks and starting “arguing” about Java vs. .NET with one another. Our voice levels quickly raised and we ended it by slapping each ...

I have been very remiss in posting lately. Unfortunately, much of what I do now involves client work that I cannot post. Fortunately, someone asked me how he could get a formatted list (e.g. tab-delimited) of files with GPS data from those files. He also added the constraint that this could not be a new piece of software (company security) and had ...

SQLblog found a new home this past weekend and was moved onto a much needed, much better server infrastructure. SQLblog continues using MaximumASP (now CBeyond Cloud Services but still found at www.maximumasp.com).  We have been very happy with our hosting and support and  MaximumASP worked with us ensure that are hardware and disaster ...

The objective of this book is to help people begin to grasp what can be done with SQL Server 2008. This book is part conceptual, exploring the new features and abilities for this next generation enterprise database product; and it is part tangible, demonstrating features via C# code and improved T-SQL.

Well I finally got around to testing with a larger set of data (9000 rows) and the inserts into the XML get logarithmically slower as you process through the cursor. For about 1000 rows or less, it works fine. For up to 2000 rows, much slower, and after that, it's intolerable.

Now that I've discussed converting XML into a set of HIERARCHYID values I thought I'd try to reverse the process... Not sure if you’ve attempted to convert a table with HIERARCHYID to an XML representation, and if you have, I’m sure you’ve experienced the same woes as me. Sure, I could have taken the route of using C# to create the XML, and it ...

In a previous blog post, I had discussed a method of shredding XML to a table with HIERARCHYID, and realized that it had a dependency that I was not too keen about: The XML data required an “id” attribute in order to create the hierarchy. I had sorted out a way to inject a unique attribute ID into all the nodes (I’ll discuss this in a follow up ...

Say hello to everyone in Raleigh for me!

A friend and colleague of mine, Caleb Jenkins, has started a fitness challenge (http://calebjenkins.wordpress.com/2009/01/29/official-rules/) and I decided that it was time for me to accelerate my fitness program that I had started in January. As of 9:00 AM on February 1, I weighed in at 201 pounds. My overall and ambitious goal is to lose at ...

SamCPP - Great point. How quickly our code becomes antiquated. Back in SQL Server 2005 days, I had implemented a UDT that is similar in function to the new HIERARCHYID data type in 2008.