Ben Dill's Blog

Right now we have owners set to whoever creates the databases for most databases, but there are a few owned by sa.  I'm thinking how great it would be to consolidate this.  To this end, I've created a database owner domain account and added it as a SQL server login.  The login only has the public server role.  In a move common with things I typically do, going overboard, I have denied this accounts ability to connect to the server and disabled it.

I haven't posted in a long time and this isn't exaclty ground breaking content, but I saw this today and I can't help myself.  To me this looks like a typo in the help file name.  Perhaps I'm seeing something where there is nothing.

As a follow up to my post from yesterday, here is the C# extension version of the integer bit manipulation.  In order to facilitate the code I post, I have created a Codeplex project.  The project name is Pickle, from my last name.  It's going to be a kitchen sink project with all sorts of utilities in it.

Hopefully my topic isn't too far off.  In this post I'm going to cover what I like to think of as easy bit manipulation.  Well, it's easier anyway.  The basic concept is that an integer is comprised of bits.  Integers are easier to look at and play with than bits, especially if we're storing bit values in SQL and we want to update them...  Using logical bitwise operators, we can query one integer with another to see which bits they have in common.  When performing the query, if one value is strictly a bit, we can see if that bit is 'on' in the second value, which is a sum of one or more bits.  Alternatively, we can test two summed bits to see if one is a union of the other.  To me this means all of one exists completely in the other.

From here, the rest is academic...

The title of this post may not be entirely accurate, but it is pretty close.  I recently encountered an issue with a 3rd party component that was reading unicode information from a MSSQL 2005 database and then sending an email using the value.  For some reason, what appeared to be random unicode characters from SQL were displayed as the flattened '?'.  The odd thing was the they were right next to other unicode values that came through just fine.  Very odd...