Wednesday 29 February 2012

Spring bean variables with data loader command line

If you use Apex Data Loader from the command line, you will know that changing usernames, passwords, and environments is a bit painful if you have more than one bean in your process-conf.xml file. Adding variables should be easy but getting the syntax right without an IDE is not. I couldn't find much help on the web so a Java guru colleague came through with the following fix.

Sunday 26 February 2012

Using Google Analytics in webs.com

The latest version of the Analytics tracking code offers an improved way to track website visitors with Google Analytics. It takes advantage of browser support for asynchronous JavaScript to enhance the speed in which the tracking code is loaded.

Saturday 25 February 2012

Differences between views and temp tables

In a relational database like SQL Server, views provide a way of giving users a way to work with specific portions of a larger schema. Temporary tables are another means of providing end users with a subset or collation of data from base tables, and at first glance it seems that these are similar methods of achieving the same end. So it is important to understand what the difference is between a view and a temp table.

Thursday 23 February 2012

T-SQL not equal to NULL

This is a well known problem addressed elsewhere, but I want to log it here anyway. When joining two tables and checking for records where a value in one does not equal a value in the other, T-SQL fails to find records where the reference table has recorded a NULL value. Presumably this is because a NULL value is unknown, so there is no way of knowing whether the two values are equal or not.

Wednesday 15 February 2012

CONVERT CAST dates in T-SQL

Sometimes you need to compare dates as text rather than in date format, and this can be especially useful when comparing dates from different systems using different data types. But T-SQL makes it easy to format different dates using the CONVERT function.