Web Notes

Problem statement We all want to write clean code and follow best coding practices. This all engineers 'North Star' goal which in many cases can not be easily achievable because of many potential difficulties with converting our ideas/good practices into working solutions.  One of an example I recently came across was about using ASP.NET Core and Entity Framework 5 to store Enum values in a relational database (like Azure SQL). Why is this a problem you might ask... and my answer here is that you want to work with Enum types in your code but persist an integer in your databases. You can think about in that way. Why we use data types at all when everything could be just a string which is getting converted into a desirable type when needed. This 'all-string' approach is of course a huge anti-pattern and a bad practice for many reasons with few being: degraded performance, increased storage space, increased code duplication.  Pre-requirements 1. Status enum type definition...

Last week I get interesting task to develop. The task was to search input text in PDF file stored in database as FileStream. The task implementation took me some time so I decided to share it with other developers. Here we are going to use SQL Server 2008 R2 (x64 Developers Edition), external driver from Adobe, Full-Text Search technology and FileStream technology.Because this sems a little bit comlicated let`s make this topic clear and do it step by step. 1) Enable FileStream - this part is pretty easy, just check wheter You already have enabled filestream on Your SQL Server instance - if no simply enable it as in the picture below. Picture 1. Enable filestream in SQL Server instance. 2) Create SQL table to store files  - mainly ther will be PDF file stored but some others is also be allright. Out table DocumentFile will be created in dbo schema and contain one column primary key with default value as sequential GUID. Important this is out table contains FileSt...

Since SQL SERVER 2005 it is possible to store XML data in database by using dedicated data type - XML. This type solved many programming problems such storing XML data as simple text which was very unpleasant to maintenance  and detecting errors in document structure. Now stroring XML data is very simple and requires only the creation of column in XML data type. But sometimes we may want to do reverse operation. I mean generating XML document or fragment from non XML columns in a single SELECT statement. Of course SQL Server meets our expectations and allow to transform any results of SELECT statement (which always returns table) to XML structure. To start transforming selected results to XML format we must use FOR XML clause right after last statemnt in normal SELECT. For example instead of using: Code Snippet SELECT ProductNumber , Name , ListPrice , Color FROM Production . Product we should use: Cod...