In this post I will document my experience of installing Oracle SOA Suite on Windows XP. No I am not switching and I’m still a Microsoft developer by heart. But I do feel that for me to improve my craft I must also understand how things are done in other camps such as Oracle, SUN, [...]

.NET Framework provides classes which give information about the machine on which code is executed. One Such class is System.Environment which gives us things like Machine Name, OS Version and much more. I recently had a requirement to programmatically detect the number of Processors on a machine. I thought this was a simple enough task. [...]

Microsoft Thrive is a clever demonstration of how Silverlight can be used for a public facing website. Other than being a showcase for Silverlight the site also has some valuable content for career development, desktop optimization, cost savings and compliance & governance among others.
 
 
The most fun is a game called Are You Certifiable. The game [...]

Windows Live Writer which IMO is the best software for blog posting has been missing a desirable feature. i.e. to backup posts, pages, settings etc. Today I found about Windows Live Writer Backup application on CodePlex. This little application will backup your posts and blog settings. The application is a RC at this stage.

Given [...]

It feels good when you find a hidden gem on www. Through a link trail which I cannot remember now I somehow landed up on SQL Server 2008 Jumpstart site. Here you can access training material which is categorised into four tracks.

Database Infrastructure Track
Business Intelligence Track
Developer Track
Application Compatibility & Upgrade Track,

 
Each of the tracks have [...]

This one always gets me off guard so I’m posting this here for more than anything else to remind me. The issue occurs when you configure your MOSS environment which is normally done after installing MOSS. The issue is that while inserting sample data the wizard throws an error which says “Failed to create sample [...]

In SQL Server 2008 you can find if a database is online of offline by querying databases system view. A simple query such as this one gives me a list of all databases on my server and the second column shows if the database is online or offline.

SELECT Name, state_desc
FROM sys.databases

On my server [...]

SQL Server by default follows Windows password policy requirements for SQL Server Login accounts. This forces you to follow the same policy for SQL Server logins as you would for windows logins and this is a good thing. But sometimes you want to bypass that validation maybe to get a test login in place. You [...]

If you are creating a SQL Server login using a script then it is advisable to check if the login you are creating already exists. If you do not do this then SQL Server will throw an error. For example if I execute this statement when a login with name test_user already exists, I will [...]

I found this very interesting.
When you install Oracle, a user by the name of Scott is always created for you. This users’ password is Tiger. The user is actually named after Bruce Scott who was one of the first employees at Oracle and Tiger was his cat’s name.
Original Source.

Database Mail configuration settings can be retrieved using sysmail_help_configure_sp stored procedure. Like other database mail object, this stored procedure also resides in msdb database. Running the stored procedure on my machine gives the following results.

sysmail_help_configure_sp

You can easily get information on how much space a table is using by executing sp_spaceused stored procedure. Executing the following query on AdventureWorks database shows me how much space Person.Contact table is using. Information presented is detailed which includes the number of rows, reserved space, index size, space used by data and any unused [...]