Satan And The Evil

Jul 31, 2006

The dialogue with you makes me fully aware of the origin and the nature
of some dreadful phenomena of the modern mentality: the
dissatisfaction, the uncertainty, the rebellion, the intimate
unhappiness of the contemporary human beings.
They have lost the deep, metaphysical sense of the existence, the
meaning of their own life, the hope of any destiny.
The Light illuminating all the environment has been extinguished, and
all the men are going on like blind ones, looking for a point of
orientation and support, getting cross at each other and embracing one
another as at random.

Website of the author www.lorenzocrescini.it/right
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SQL Express = The Source Of All Evil???

Sep 24, 2007

Is this a Microsoft joke? It looks like a legitimate Microsoft site:

http://thesource.ofallevil.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=4C6BA9FD-319A-4887-BC75-3B02B5E48A40&displaylang=en

I found it in a Google search for sql server express, but it sure has a strange URL.

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What Do You Call This Type Of Design? Is It Evil?

Jun 4, 2007

Hi there,

I am new here, and I've tried to see if this topic has been discussed elsewhere, but since I am not familiar with the terminology, I'll stick my neck out and ask.

Quick background: I am a C# developer with limited exposure to and experience with SQL. I now have to make some design decisions for a newer version of a "legacy" app. Since those of us who are left here basically know how to query the database and do the CRUD work, but don't have a lot of mad skills in the db design department, I am wondering to which degree we should leave things alone.

Ok, so now to the actual issue.

This database is used by an application that registers sales locally for certain types of sales teams. All data is eventually extracted and sent off as ASCII files to central processing, but until then, they are stored in a table for each sales campaign.

Information about campaigns is stored in one table called CampaignSettings. Highlights of this table include a CampaignID (primary key) and some generic sales information, plus a reference to the table that holds customer information. Yep, each campaign has it's own table, as customer registrations (not just for sales, but for information requests etc.) can easily scale into the hundereds of thousands, plus the number of campaigns will eventually reach at least 20-50 active at any given time.

Yep, perhaps it sounds like a huge task for inexperienced db people, that's why we have to learn, and fast! ;)

Ok, so these individual campaign tables is where it gets interesting, and they are the reason I am writing. Each campaign table has the same basic structure - a RecordID, an insertion date, several customer information fields. And then they have two additional sets of fields; The salesinfo "nodes", and the "custom fields".

There is a table called sinode, which pretty much looks like this:

id - int, primary key
campaign - foreign key to campaignsettings campaignid field
field - varchar, the name of the column in the campaign table
desc - a description of what goes in the field (used in the sales registration app)
default - a reasonable default value showing the user what to register

Using this method, the idea is that each campaign can have a different structure (i.e. different product types sold = different information needs to be registered).

Also, for the "custom fields" stuff, something similar is employed. There is a scriptvariables table, similar to the sinode one, which contains custom fields that campaigns contain - when they feel like it, they can for instance find everyone with a certain value in a custom field and send them some sales propaganda by snailmail, with some of these script variables used in the letter. The difference between salesinfo columns and custom field columns is basically that only salesinfo columns (plus a few of the standard ones present in all tables) are reported to central processing.

QUESTION #1: Is there a name for such a table structure, where the very definition of tables themselves are somewhat dynamic and applications need to query support tables in order to know the customer table structure for each campaign. Is the name "Brain Dead Design"? ;) Or is this an acceptable way of doing things?

Since we're now upgrading things a little, among other things we're considering moving from "old fashioned" ADO.NET to LINQ or some kind of O/R mapping application, so that we'll cut down on the maintenance of the database <-> object layer.

QUESTION #2: Will an O/R Mapper or LINQ (when Orcas goes RTM) be able to handle the kind of tables we're talking about here, considering that the structure of the individual customer table is not known at compile time, but depends on the database?

And then, there's the question that has been haunting me for a while now..

QUESTION #3: If you, the reader, who with great probability knows a lot more about database design than I do, were put in charge of such a project - how would YOU design it? Keep it like today? Create a huge normalization table for sales items and custom fields? What kind of architecture would be "correct" in this case, considering that our customers scale from the very small with few campaigns to the relative large with big, nasty customer tables.

I will be extremely grateful for any replies, and I promise to read many heavy SQL books as penance, and spend 10% of my work day helping newbies for several weeks once I attain enlightenment! :)

Thanks in advance,

Havremunken

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How To Restrict Evil Create Scripts?

Aug 8, 2006

Hi,For a service I'm working on I need to ask the user for their databasecreate script. It's used to re-create the users database schema in atemporary database on a in-house server in an automated fashion.For security reasons, I need to be sure that the create script can onlycreate tables, columns etc and not things like snooping in otherdatabases and/or formatting the server.Can you give me pointers about what the minimum grants are to let goodscript execute successfully and evil scripts fail?Regards,Ward

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Building Query Strings Within Stored Procs - Good Or Evil?

Feb 4, 2008

I ran across this technique being used in an application the other day. It seems not a good idea to me. What do you think?

1. The proc builds a basic query, nothing real fancy, into a string variable called @SQL defined as varchar 2000. Depending on the result desired, the group by clause can be one of three different sort orders.

2. The string is executed via EXEC @SQL.

It seems to me that the whole process can eliminate the EXEC and just use some other construct. All the parameters are passed in via the initial call to the stored proc. It also seems that every time this is executed it will result in a new query compile and cache useage, no matter what. Wasteful? Should I take the developers aside and knock heads? I think the app was coded by some folks who were rookies then but may be willing to crack open their code. Or, am I the one that is a rookie?

Thanks for your inputs.

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Are Embedded Views (Views Within Views...) Evil And If So Why?

Apr 3, 2006

Fellow database developers,I would like to draw on your experience with views. I have a databasethat includes many views. Sometimes, views contains other views, andthose views in turn may contain views. In fact, I have some views inmy database that are a product of nested views of up to 6 levels deep!The reason we did this was.1. Object-oriented in nature. Makes it easy to work with them.2. Changing an underlying view (adding new fields, removing etc),automatically the higher up views inherit this new information. Thismake maintenance very easy.3. These nested views are only ever used for the reporting side of ourapplication, not for the day-to-day database use by the application.We use Crystal Reports and Crystal is smart enough (can't believe Ijust said that about Crystal) to only pull back the fields that arebeing accessed by the report. In other words, Crystal will issue aSelect field1, field2, field3 from ReportingView Where .... eventhough "ReportingView" contains a long list of fields.Problems I can see.1. Parent views generally use "Select * From childview". This meansthat we have to execute a "sp_refreshview" command against all viewswhenever child views are altered.2. Parent views return a lot of information that isn't necessarilyused.3. Makes it harder to track down exactly where the information iscoming from. You have to drill right through to the child view to seethe raw table joins etc.Does anyone have any comments on this database design? I would love tohear your opinions and tales from the trenches.Best regards,Rod.

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