Archives
-
This Week’s Link List (December 31, 2010)
I considered publishing a “best links of 2010” list here, but alas, there was too much good content in just this week to overlook…everything from another JumpIn Camp report and another ZCE exam experience to free Windows/SQL Azure passes and new Azure/PHP articles…plenty to keep you busy over the New Year’s weekend…
-
This Week’s Link List (December 24, 2010)
Things are definitely not slowing down in December. This week, everything from news about a stable Doctrine 2 release (and how to use its DBAL to create DB schemas) to blog posts about bugs/features in PHP 5.3 (and a couple of just-for-fun links thrown in for good measure). Enjoy reading…
-
Troubleshooting and Performance Tuning with SQL Server Traces
A couple of weeks ago I wrote a post (How to Change Database Settings with the PDO_SQLSRV Driver) that highlighted a problem that came up at the November JumpIn! Camp in Redmond. To get to the root of the problem (and eventually a solution), I used SQL Profiler to monitor events on my database server. Of course, monitoring server events can be helpful in troubleshooting any issue, including performance issues, when it comes to data-driven applications. Unfortunately, SQL Profiler (a tool that allows you to easily monitor server activity) is not included as part of SQL Server Express. Fortunately, SQL Profiler is just a nice UI for functionality that is built into SQL Server (including the Express version). So, in this post I’ll show you how to create, read from, and write to a trace file using SQL and SQL Server Management Studio (which you can download for free from here).
-
This Week’s Link List (December 17, 2010)
I thought December was supposed to be a quiet month. Judging by all the excellent content I’m finding, I guess I was wrong…
-
Video Tour of PHP Manager for IIS
Last week, Ruslan Yakushev announced the release of the 1.1 version of the PHP Manager for IIS. I thought a tour of the PHP Manager functionality might work best in video format. I’d be interested learning what you think of the PHP Manager itself, but also in knowing what you think of the video format.
-
This Week’s Link List (December 10, 2010)
Apologies in advance for this week’s lengthy list…too much good stuff to whittle it down much. If this keeps up, I’ll have to post lists twice a week!
-
How to Change Database Settings with the PDO_SQLSRV Driver
This post is based on another lesson I learned at the JumpIn! camp in Redmond a few weeks ago. The short story is this: If you are using the PDO_SQLSRV driver and you want to execute a query that changes a database setting (e.g. SET NOCOUNT ON), use the PDO::query method with the PDO::SQLSRV_ATTR_DIRECT_QUERY attribute. If you use PDO::query without that attribute, the database setting you expected to change may not be applied to subsequent queries. The longer story has to do with why this is the case, which is what I’ll explain in this post.
-
Converting MySQL Queries to MS SQL Server Queries
At the JumpIn! Camp that took place a few weeks ago, PHP developers from several countries were invited to come to Redmond and work closely with Microsoft developers to build support for SQL Server and SQL Azure into their applications. (As expected, the camp was more than just that. It was also an excellent two-way learning experience…you can read more about the camp here). One of the challenges that these PHP developers faced was in migrating their MySQL schemas and data to SQL Server. The tool that helped in doing this was the SQL Server Migration Assistant for MySQL 1.0 (SSMA), which, by most accounts, did a good job at converting databases. (For a quick tutorial on how to use this tool to migrate a database, see this post.) However, after converting databases, developers still had to convert individual queries from MySQL syntax to SQL Server syntax in order to build SQL Server support into their applications. For most simple queries, this isn’t terribly difficult. However, for some queries, the conversion is not at all straight forward. What I didn’t know (and was happy to learn) was that SSMA can also help convert queries. So, in this post I’ll show you how to use SSMA to convert a single MySQL query to a SQL Server query.
-
This Week’s Link List (December 3, 2010)
November was an exceptionally busy month and, by the looks of things, December promises to be just as busy. This week’s links include news about an update release for the PHP Drivers for SQL Server, the JumpIn! Camp that took place a couple of weeks ago, and much more…
-
Update Release of the PHP Drivers for SQL Server
An update release to the Microsoft Drivers for SQL Server for PHP 2.0 is now available. You can download it here and you can read what Ashay Chaudhary (Program Manager for the drivers) had to say about the release here. The release contains fixes for 4 bugs: