March 2005 - Posts
Reporting Services is the new reporting platform for Microsoft. It is a completely .NET based implementation of a reporting engine couple with rendering extensions for various formats (like Word, Excel, PDF etc). One of the great features of SQL RS is the ability to extend the application to support new rendering formats. For example, if you wanted to render the report output in CSV format, it is quite simple to extend the engine to support this functionality.
Here is a great article by James Yip on how to achieve this: Custom Rendering
After me return from Hawaii, things were a bit hectic for a week. On 23rd March, I took a session in Bangalore on the Visual Studio 2005 new features and support for SQL Server 2005 for Satyam Bangalore folks (the event is called Satyam MSDN). We had around 50+ attendees and many of them were new to VS 2005 and I think they were all impressed with what VS 2005 had to offer. I'm impressed too, because the list of features and productivity enhancements is just overwhelming, not to mention the new updates to ADO.NET.
There are a lot of cool things on VS 2005 and am planning to write a set of articles on my web site and also provide some content to 3rd party sites pretty soon. Things should get started soon!
Am writing this blog from Hawaii! Am here for around 6 days to attend my company's annual user conference called Summit 2005. Its a huge conference attended by more than 6000+ people from the higher education sector. We, as a company, develop solutions for the higher education schools of the US.
That apart, my stay in Hawaii is quite fabulous. Landed here on Friday after a long journey and then crashed out in the hotel. The next day, I was fortunate enough to get a seat on the island tour and it was really great. To me, Hawaii looked like Goa + Kodaikanal in India. There are a lot of things to see, but so little time. Am here till the Thursday and hope to do some more touring of this island.
One quick trivia. I learnt that Hawaii has only 12 alphabets. The usual vowels of A E I O U and 7 consonants. The best thing is, it is 100% phonetic and am having fun pronouncing the names! :-)
In SQL Server 2000, there is a facility for you to add a constraint using the WITH NOCHECK option to avoid checking of existing data that can possibly violate the constraint. This is useful in situations wherein you feel that a constraint was not required earlier and then later on, you decided that you need the constraint. WITH NOCHECK ensures that existing data is not checked, however, when any updates are made and the resultant resultset violates the check, the constraint will fire. For new data that is being inserted, the constraint is anyways enforced.
Recently, I came across this posting at Microsoft that talks about the woes of using this option: WITH NOCHECK Issues. As per this article it says that using WITH NOCHECK can return incorrect results, since SQL Server assumes that the check is enforced (the article talks about an example using FKs). This could be bad news! However, the bug is supposed to be fixed in SP4 of SQL Server 2000. How about the same in SQL Server 2005, well its fixed there :-)