Packt Publishing is celebrating the release of its 1000th title by offering web site members their choice of free eBook. They are also opening their online library for a week for free to members, to allow you to research your choice.
If you’re not already a member, signing up is free, but you have to do so by September 30th to get the free eBook.
To sign up, just go to www.packtpub.com/login.
If you work with any kind of healthcare data, then odds are you’ll deal with NPI (National Provider Identifier) numbers. The NPI is a 10-digit number consisting of 9 digits (with the first digit being a 1 or a 2) followed by a check digit. The check digit uses the Luhn algorithm, which is calculated like this: Double the value of alternate digits beginning with the rightmost digit. Add the individual digits of the products resulting from step 1 to the unaffected digits from the original number. Subtract ......
I'm working on a mobile location search app, and needed a way to find addresses within a certain radius of the device's current position. A little Googling found a simple function that will return the distance in miles: CREATE FUNCTION dbo.Distance( @lat1 float , @long1 float , @lat2 float , @long2 float) RETURNS float AS BEGIN DECLARE @DegToRad float = 57.29577951 DECLARE @Ans float = 0 DECLARE @Miles float = 0 SET @Ans = SIN(@lat1 / @DegToRad) * SIN(@lat2 / @DegToRad) + COS(@lat1 / @DegToRad ) ......
RedGate SQL Source Control is a Management Studio add-in that allows you to seamlessly (hopefully...) connect your existing source control system to SQL Server. It is advertised as doing all the typical stuff you'd expect: Source control schemas and data within SSMS Connect databases to TFS, SVN, Sourcegear Vault, Vault Pro, Mercurial, Perforce, Git, Bazaar, and any source control system with a capable command line Work with shared development databases, or individual copies Track changes to follow ......
Among the many useful SQL snippets I regularly use is this little bit that will return row counts in a table: SELECT so.name as TableName, MAX(si.rows) as [RowCount] FROM sysobjects so JOIN sysindexes si ON si.id = OBJECT_ID(so.name) WHERE so.xtype = 'U' GROUP BY so.name ORDER BY [RowCount] DESC This is handy to find tables that have grown wildly, zero-row tables that could (possibly) be dropped, or other clues into the data. Right off the bat you may spot some "non-ideal" code - I'm using sysobjects ......
GiveCamp is a weekend-long event where software developers, designers, and database administrators donate their time to create custom software for non-profit organizations. This custom software could be a new website for the nonprofit organization, a small data-collection application to keep track of members, or a application for the Red Cross that automatically emails a blood donor three months after they’ve donated blood to remind them that they are now eligible to donate again. The only limitation ......
I needed to downgrade SQL Server 2008 from Enterprise to Standard on a Server 2008 machine, and and kept getting this error when trying to uninstall: SQL Server Setup has encountered the following error: Invoke or BeginInvoke cannot be called on a control until the window handle has been created It turns out the setup utility really doesn't like having ANY other windows open - I closed the Server Manager window and it worked ......