In the same way there’s a tight bond between MySQL and PHP, SQL Server and ASP.NET, SQL Server and ColdFusion – what goes well with Java? Oracle? Being curious, I started searching in employment web sites. I searched for “Java” and one of these databases: Oracle, MySQL, SQL Server and PostgreSQL. (I put in “SQL Server” using quotes.) The sites used were: craigslist, Monster.com, Dice.com, and Yahoo! Hotjobs.

The numbers signify how many job entries were returned.

So it does seem Oracle goes with Java. Also I noticed how many people call “SQL Server” just “SQL.” Sort of confusing and hard to tell if they’re referring to the platform or language.

Logical diagrams are to convey requirements only. Physical diagrams represent the actual data structure to support the requirements and take into account technical scalability and speed.

Edit: I hate the way I had to format this document for this blog post. If you want this tutorial better formatted, check out the Word document.

One-to-Many Relationship

Logical

On ER/Studio, two tables are created. The Store table has a primary key StoreID. The Manager table has a primary key, ManagerID and a foreign key, StoredID (which is mapped to StoreID from the Store table).

Physical

On SQL Server, two tables are created. The Store table has a primary key StoreID. The Manager table has a primary key, ManagerID and a foreign key, StoredID (which is mapped to StoreID from the Store table).

Manager Table:

If you allow NULLs for StoreID in the Manager table, then you’ll be able to have a Manager without a store. If you don’t allow NULLs (leave it unchecked), then you’ll have to have at least one Store assigned to a Manager.

Querying

The above states that one store can have many managers. Here’s some sample data what’s in the tables:

SELECT * FROM Manager

SELECT * FROM Store

Get all manager information with for all managers that belong to a store:

SELECT Manager.ManagerID, Manager.FirstName, Manager.LastName, Manager.StoreID, Store.[Name], Store.Address, Store.STATE, Store.City, Store.Zip FROM Manager INNER JOIN Store ON Manager.StoreID = Store.StoreID

Get all manager information with for all managers (even if they don’t have a store):

SELECT Manager.ManagerID, Manager.FirstName, Manager.LastName, Manager.StoreID, Store.[Name], Store.Address, Store.STATE, Store.City, Store.Zip FROM Manager LEFT OUTER JOIN Store ON Manager.StoreID = Store.StoreID

Notice the NULL for Steamboat Willie. He doesn’t have a store, so all Store related fields show as NULL.

Many-to-Many Relationship

In order to implement this physically, you need a join table. In this case, we use StoreManager. Logically, you only need only two entities (Store and Manager).

Logical

Physical

On SQL Server, three tables are created. The Store table has a primary key StoreID. The Manager table has a primary key, ManagerID. The table StoreManager has two foreign keys:  StoredID (which is mapped to StoreID from the Store table) and ManagerID (which is mapped to the ManagerID from the Manager table).

StoreManager Table:

If you allow NULLs for StoreID and ManagerID in the StoreManager table, then you’ll be able to have a Manager without a store. If you don’t allow NULLs (leave it unchecked for both), then you’ll have to have at least one Store assigned to a Manager.

Here’s some sample data what’s in the tables:

SELECT * FROM Manager

SELECT * FROM Store

SELECT * FROM StoreManager

Get all manager information associated with his store:

SELECT  Manager.ManagerID,  Manager.FirstName,  Manager.LastName,
        StoreManager.StoreID, StoreManager.ManagerID, Store.StoreID,
        Store.[Name],Store.Address, Store.STATE, Store.City, Store.Zip
FROM    Store
        INNER JOIN StoreManager ON Store.StoreID = StoreManager.StoreID
        INNER JOIN Manager ON StoreManager.ManagerID = Manager.ManagerID

Being tired of checking the “Allow comments on this post” checkbox every time I make a new post, I went into the database and changed the setting. By default, it’s set to “closed” meaning you have to check it all the time. See for yourself:

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select option_name, option_value
from wp_options where option_name in ( 'default_comment_status' );

Change it to “open”:

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update wp_options
set option_value='open'
where option_name in('default_comment_status');

Now the checkbox should always be checked.

Today I needed to analyze some forum data from vBulletin running MySQL. The table on MySQL had 60,000 records. Because my playing field is SQL Server and not MySQL, and I needed to slice and dice the data, I needed a way to get the data onto SQL Server. Because of some security restrictions, I could not set up a linked server on SQL Server. I don’t have remote access to the Linux box either. I tried exporting from SQLYog, but CSV data could not be properly delimited and failed when I did a database import via the SSIS import wizard (the table has a lot of flexability to use any character and is often abused by spammers). What did I do?

I only had 4 columns to import for the table. So I ran a select statement returning one column ordered by the id. Then I copied and pasted into an Excel spreadsheet. I did this for all four rows. Because Excel doesn’t use delimiters, but rather cells to separate, I didn’t have to worry about data breaking. Then after that, I did an import via the SSIS import wizard. Ta-da, I can now slice and dice my data. There are probably more efficient ways to do this, but I needed a quick solution and this did it.