Google Analytics is good stuff

I was interested in tracking visitors to my blog site and I signed up for Google Analytics. It's really cool. It has even bench marking and Map overlay of visitors besides many other interesting statistical measures. It's a nice tool. I know now that most of my visitors are from Kalifornia.

Hasta La Vista!

Cold Fusion articles you may want to read

Initial:
Installing the ColdFusion MX Server

My First Application on ColdFusion MX Server


Basic:
What You Must Know About ColdFusion Flow-Controls

What You Must Know About Operators in ColdFusion!

Everything You Must Know About ColdFusion Variables


Database:
Querying SQL 2000 Server from ColdFusion

How to Access a SQL Anywhere Database with ColdFusion

Web Service:

Creating a Web Service with ColdFusion: the Basics

AJAX:

CFAjax: What it is and How to Use it


XML:

Roaming through XMLDOM: An AJAX Prerequisite

CFXML: Probing XMLDOM in ColdFusion

What are those guys in Bangalore and Beijing upto?

With globalization time is not the only constraint and we need to contend with space (location, fortunatlely on earth). Storing Spatial information has become very important to know what those guys are doing in Bangalore or Beijing.

SQL Server 2008 can handle this very well. If you believe the earth is flat you can use the 'Geometric' data, on the other hand if you believe the earth is not flat but round (or oval) you cannot just use coordinates but you use longitudes and latitudes, in other words the geographic representation. SQL Server 2008 handles both of them well.

This time around Microsoft is doing it properly, I mean, adhering to well known standards. Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) Simple Features for SQL Specification version 1.1.0 in the case of Geometric data and uses well known GPS latitude and longitude coordinates for geographic representation.

I will be back next time with more on this.

Give generously to the International Rescue Committee

For the forlorn, the forgotten and for those whose hopes appears to have foreclosed.

Give generously your time and resources to this organization



International Rescue Committee

Creating a Cube in SSAS 2008

As noted in Part 1, OLAP presents Business Intelligence via what is known as a CUBE. A Cube has many dimensions and it provides a faster method to access the buried intelligence compared to the structured querying where the overhead of 'Joins' makes it inefficient. Taking the example of a 'Sales' Cube having everything related to sales we can identify the dimensions as the Sales Outlet, The Customers , The Products and the Time period over which sales are being audited or looked into, etc. We also notice that there are certain measures that we are interested in related to these 'dimensions' , like 'Store Sales', 'Cost of Products, 'number of units sold' etc. The Analysis Services analyzes these intricate relationship that exist in a cube. In this part we will see the process of creating a Cube in VS 2008.

Read on ---> Part 2

Cube with SSAS using VS2008

Binding a dataset to a DataGrid or a DataGridView Control

In VS 2008 you will find DataGridView Control in the Toolbox, but you can also add the DataGrid, another (older) type of data bound control.

How to bind these to the dataset is described in the following link. It is assumed you have instances of these controls on your form.

http://hodentekhelp.blogspot.com/2008/07/how-to-bind-dataset-to-datagridview.html

SQL Server 2008 RC0 and Visual Studio 2008 Interaction

Problem:
You are using Visual Studio 2008 (Standard Edition in my case) and trying to use the data designer and just before you can access the database objects in the SQL Server 2008 RC0 which you have configured with SQLOLEDB you get this error:

An unexpected error has occurred.Error Message:Could not load type 'Microsoft.VisualStudio.DataDesign.SyncDesigner.SyncFacade.SyncManager' from assembly 'Microsoft.VisualStudio.DataDesign.SyncDesigner.DslPackage.Version=9.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b03f5f7f11d50a3a'.

You would get the same message for other products as well,

Oracle 10G Xe
SQL Express 2005

Note with the earlier CTP's I could get away using ODBC and OLE DB Connectiviy as in,

http://hodentek.blogspot.com/2008/04/accessing-sql-server-2008-with-visual.html

http://www.mysorian.com/Packt/DataPagerControl.htm (unpublished)

Solution:

With the RC0 installed I had to do two things to fix this problem.

1.
Get hold of SSCERutime-ENU which is available from:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=68539FAE-CF03-4C3B-AEDA-769CC205FE5F&displaylang=en
[Microsoft SQL Server Compact 3.5 SP1 Beta and Synchronization Services for ADO.Net v1.0 SP1 Beta]

The Windows installer (MSI) file installs the SQL Server Compact and Synchronization Services for ADO.Net desktop computer runtime components that are required for developing applications in Visual Studio 2008 SP1 Beta and for running SQL Server Compact-based applications on the desktop. The MSI file also installs with SQL Server 2008 CTP and Visual Studio 2008 SP1 Beta

-------Run this file and choose to remove it

2.Get hold of VS90sp1-KB955140-ENU [Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 SP1 Beta]
from this site:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=CF99C752-1391-4BC3-BABC-86BC0B9E8E5A&displaylang=en
----Run this file

Be prepared for a long wait for this to install. It almost took two hours on a laptop (two times I thought the program hung and cancelled and the third time I let it run while I read The Rig Veda by Wendy O'Flaherty [Penguin Classics] to brush up my religious studies).

Analysis Services Cube with VS 2008 Part 1

Get a head start in using SSAS 2008

A cube in the context of Business Intelligence is a multidimensional representation of business facts that can be accessed quickly to provide specific information. (This can be accomplished by properly written queries in a relational database, but the overhead involved in processing the query, which may involve a large number of 'joins', is simply not efficient). While a relational model is more suited to OLTP, a different model is necessary for OLAP. Whereas highly normalized tables are a norm for OLTP, the model for OLAP does not require normalization. The SQL Server Analysis Services that supersedes the earlier versions is specifically meant for analyzing data in the archives or in OLTP databases to be retrieved and burnished to provide the 'Intelligence' by mining for facts hidden in the data.

Read on Part 1 at:

http://www.packtpub.com/article/creating-analysis-services-cube-visual-studio-2008-part1

Report Processing in SSRS 2008

Read this short note extracted and summarized from the Books-on line,

http://hodentekhelp.blogspot.com/2008/07/how-are-reports-processed-on-report.html

Soap Web Service with SQL Anywhere

Enabling interoperability is one of the greatest benefits of using web services. In the business world, applications work on different platforms with different operating systems running applications whose programming languages vary wildly. For applications to interact
with each other there should be a common method to transparently talk to all the different systems. In fact, the charter of the WS-I, an open industry organization source, is to promote this idea of interoperability across platforms, operating systems, and programming languages.

Read this article ...

Consuming a SQL Anywhere native web service using a .NET client
By Jayaram Krishnaswamy
International Sybase Users Group Technical Journal, May / June 2008, Pages 14 - 19

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