Satheesh Kannan Chandra's Blog

This is time to look back. We are at the end of the year 2005. Here is the top five innovations or technical advancements in the year 2005 that made researchers, software engineers, and entire communities to find innovative ways to take advantage of computing's growing power and falling costs.

Also go thru this interesting article "Life after Silicon" about Nanotechnology which may replace silicon or any semiconductor technology from the chip making industry.

“FOR” command in Windows (not a T-SQL FOR statement) is a useful statement. I am using this command in almost all of my windows and SQL Server administrative script requirements. Here is the one use of FOR command in SQL Server environment.
I had a requirement to automatically load all SQL scripts from a particular folder into a SQL Server. For this requirement I preferred batch script, which use FOR command. We have scheduled a job in SQL Server with the batch file that loads SQL Scripts into the SQL Server.

You can find the batch file from the following link.
http://www.skchandra.com/batchfiles/load_scripts.zip

The batch file uses the Windows authentication method and loads all SQL scripts with .SQL extension from the folder where the batch file resides.

To assign a value to a variable we use either SELECT or SET statement based on our preference. Is there any difference between the two assignment statements? I can see few differences when using these two statements. They are:

• We can use SELECT statement when we assign values to more than one variable. However SET can be used to assign value to one variable at a time.
• SELECT statement works well with record sets, hence it won’t throw any error when we assign a record set value to a variable. Whereas SET statement throws an error if we try to assign record set value to a variable if the record set returns more than one value.
  
  USE northwind
  GO
  DECLARE @selectVar varchar(40), @setVar varchar (40)
  SELECT @selectVar = LastName FROM Employees
  SELECT @selectVar
  SET @setVar = (SELECT lastname FROM Employees WHERE EmployeeID = 1)
  SELECT @setVar
  
  In the above code, SELECT assignment statement accepts the record set and assigns the last value to the variable selectVar. However, if we use SET statement without limiting the result of the SELECT statement to a single value (by using where clause), then the SET statement returns an error.
• SET statement is ANSI standard where SELECT is not.

# posted by Satheesh Chandra @ 7:06 PM 0 comments

Within a day “Upma” became a favorite dish for techies those are in Bangalore. Yes. This is the South Indian breakfast item which Bill loved to eat in his Indian tour. “Launch Tour 2005” was the most awaited event of this year for Microsoft technology practitioners. Nearly 5000 IT professionals gathered in Bangalore palace grounds to see their hero. Mr. Gates presented the event’s key note and then participated in QA section. The crowd cheered when Bill remarked about India’s first religion Cricket. He announced a contest program “http://code4bill.com”for student’s community, through which Microsoft providing an opportunity for the bright talents to work in Redmond. Totally it was a nice experience for me to attend the event.

Visit The Notorious Bill Gates for his view on Bangalored Jobs.