I'd rather play golf

There are a number of mechanisms one can use to affect the precise semantics of an SQL query, in particular to insulate (or expose) the affects of concurrent transactions to the results of a particular SQL statement. One such mechanism is the type of cursor that is used. As an example, INSENSITIVE cursors materialize the [...]

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Now that the Brier is over–for those of you not in the know, the Brier is the Canadian Mens’ Curling Championship–we can get back to some regularly scheduled programming. Lately I’ve been getting some questions about the differences between Sybase jConnect and the iAnywhere JDBC driver, so I thought I’d put some points down here. [...]

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In a recent blog post on the SQL Server Magazine website, columnist Itzik Ben-Gan describes some Transact-SQL language features that will disappear from the next release of Microsoft SQL Server, and in addition some language features that are planned to be eliminated in versions after that. These deprecated features are, of course, of interest to [...]

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Last year, Brian Moran of SQL Server Magazine wrote this post, and more recently followed it with another post from 25 September of this year, wondering why, after an entire year, only Microsoft SQL Server is the database platform for any TPC-E benchmark. In his more recent article, Mr. Moran postulates: I haven’t been able [...]

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I’ve spent some time over the past week rewriting the SQL Anywhere Hibernate dialect routine, which is part of the Hibernate 3.2 distribution. The original dialect routine, inaccurately named SybaseAnywhere.java, inherited virtually all of its functionality from the Sybase11Dialect.java routine (supporting ASE), thereby omitting a variety of language functionality provided by SQL Anywhere: support for [...]

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One of Hibernate’s strengths is its ability to work with a wide variety of database systems. One of the ways in which it is able to do so is including a Java layer that customizes the SQL statements being sent to the underlying DBMS to match the dialect and feature set of that particular system. [...]

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Transaction semantics (ACIDity) and concurrency control are critical to both application correctness and application performance. But before I discuss Hibernate in these areas, a personal story. About three years ago I had the experience of withdrawing money from my chequing account through an ATM when the ATM crashed. At the point the ATM crashed, I [...]

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In a previous post I stated that I do not believe that many firms go to the trouble of detailed performance tuning, for parameters such as buffer pool configuration, simply because it is too labour-intensive: static tuning analysis requires a workload that is (1) known and (2) fairly constant. Doing this manual performance tuning was [...]

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