Jerry Dixon

Do you love XML? Have you been using XML with SQL Server? Many people have, starting way back when with SQL Server 7.0. Back then, there was no support for XML in the database, so we had to write external programs to convert the relational data into an XML format. This was time-consuming and often inefficient. When SQL Server 2000 came out, with its integrated support for XML, there were a lot of high expectations. Unfortunately, XML still couldn't be easily stored in the database, although it could be created and consumed. XML could be stored in the database as a large string of text, but this was problematic at best. Large VARCHAR and TEXT strings are hard to manipulate. This worked, though, and programmers managed to create great systems. Still, something more was ne... (more)

Hot-Swappable Objects

Like many of you, I have been using .NET since before it was officially released. Even now, after years of using the product, I am still impressed by its incredibly flexible nature. When using the classes in the .NET framework, there are usually half a dozen ways of performing the task at hand. While this does tend to make learning the framework a bit of a chore, it seems to pay off time... (more)

SQL Server Web Services

These days, applications built around a service-oriented architecture (SOA) are all the rage. Complex systems can be written as a collection of services that communicate with each other through standard protocols. When implemented properly, these systems can become immensely flexible, scalable, and easy to maintain. The most common SOA designs utilize Web services as the communications m... (more)

PIVOT and OUTPUT

SQL Server 2005 has many new and improved features. So many, in fact, that it would be very difficult to cover them all thoroughly. Therefore, I've been concentrating on those features that I feel will have the most impact on developers. Because of this, I want to present two more new T-SQL features. They were left out of my first T-SQL article because of space limitations. However, I be... (more)

DDL Triggers

A number of years ago, I worked for a company that was developing internal applications with SQL Server 2000. We didn't have any real database administrators. I was given that responsibility, but I was really a developer, one of many in fact. The problem with this arrangement was that all the developers had high-level rights to SQL Server. Each one could make whatever changes seemed appr... (more)