The difference between these functions and the data and performance considerations when executing data queries.
Archive for the ‘Software Development’ Category
SQL Server - ExecuteNonQuery, ExecuteReader and ExecuteScalar functions
Sunday, January 24th, 2010SQL Server Profiler - SQL Server 2005 Workgroup Edition
Thursday, January 14th, 2010An interesting problem was presented today, when a database system was presented that was raising, seemingly intermittently, unhandled exceptions within a particular section of the system. This would have been a pretty tractable, but for the fact that the source code was not immediately available and the problem was on a live system and so needed to resolved with some urgency.
Admittedly, there was some initial head scratching while table records were examined and compared to try and identify any inconsistencies. This revealed nothing and the JIT debugger could not be enabled as the exceptions were being raised in a windows form that had not been compiled to allow JIT debugging.
The next approach was to see if the SQL commands the client was executing could be intercepted. Then, the thinking went, the commands could be compared to see what was going wrong and what was going right when exceptions were and were not raised. As it turned out SQL Server provide a tool called a Profiler that offers this functionality but this is not provided with the version we were working with - SQL Server 2005 Workgroup Edition. However we did find this open source Profiler with which the cause of the problems was identified. Such profilers are more commonly used to monitor database server workloads.
Systems Upgrade - Issue Tracking System
Sunday, January 10th, 2010As part of plans for the new year at Logicia we are looking to implement an issue tracking system to help more effectively and efficiently manage the development, maintenance and support requests received.
Analysis of the requirements provided a list of features to search for in suitable solutions that would help the team better deal with requests and ensure its integration with the existing suite of systems and tools used.
Early in our analysis we realised that bug tracking tools such as bugzilla, trac and mantis were not suited to our needs. Instead the two issue tracking systems short-listed to be evaluated are OTRS and Request Tracker (RT). These systems will be further investigated and trialed in the coming weeks and findings in our specific application will be reported here.