Well I’m waiting for the .Net version of Panorama Nova View. But I guess I can see there are more important people in line… Today I found myself reading in the news that Panorama has joined forces with Google Apps to give the Pivot Table and Pivot Chart capabilities to the Google spreadsheet. Up till now I have seen Panorama’s add – in to the Microsoft Excel, but as Microsoft has been pushing Proclarity forward, Google might well be a fresh alternative!
So if you’re using Google Apps, you might very well want to read more details about the news and if you’re interested, just go ahead and download the Panorama add-in for the Google spreadsheet.
I found out today something quite peculiar, which I didn't know up till now.
I have a table which has codes and names in it. The names are in Hebrew and need to be reversed. The table should have rows in it only if there exists a description for the code. It shouldn't have codes in it that don't have a description. This is my select statement and its result:
Which was weird, because why would I have a blank line for a code? I shouldn't have a line for it at all in that case. Still, I needed to reverse the description as the Hebrew description should be read the other way around. So I did another select statement using the reverse function this time, and got this:
The "Pratim" field (the description) is of data type varchar, and the data in the row for the specific row I'm looking at begins with junk:
It seems that when you run a reverse function in SQL on a field of varchar which begins with junk, the result pane sees the junk first and shows you empty data. At the same time, if you run a reverse function in SQL on a varchar filed and the data in it ends with junk, then you get the up side of the same behavior as you get the data with the junk omitted.
I was amused to see the quirks that certain data can create quirks on a reverse function in such a simple "select" statement. Even more so, I enjoyed seeing how every minus will also have its plus…
SQL Server Data Services - SSDS
Well
I guess this means that soon enough we'll all have to know some new initials... Microsoft
has announced in MIX08 about SQL Server Data Services (SSDS). SSDS
is a new, web-based, on-demand data storage and query processing utility
services. SQL Server Data Services is built on SQL Server database and
Windows Server technologies and Microsoft promises scalability and security in
this new service. Just so as to promise
they're keeping up on all ends, SSDS also enables the use of LINQ -
based query language and also full - text search.
SQL Server Data Services also supports
a flexible data model with no schemas required. An entity is the smallest unit
of consistency. It can be independently serialized, updated, etc. The data
types supported for the properties of the entities are: string, binary, boolean,
number, and date-time.
SQL
Server Data Services has no limit on the amount of data that you can store
for it. Data will be partitioned in order to scale to unlimited size.
Right
now, the beta version of SSDS is only available for the participants of
MIX08, but if just like me, you'd like to hear about it when it becomes public,
then sign up for SQL Server Data
Services even now. You'll be able to see all the projects that Microsoft Connect has to
offer.