Vishnu Prasad Blog

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We can use PIVOT relational operator to change a table-valued expression into another table. PIVOT rotates a table-valued expression by turning the unique values from one column in the expression into multiple columns in the output, and performs aggregations where they are required on any remaining column values that are wanted in the final output. Source msdn.

Here is an example I was working on.

I have a table called Student and with 3 columns Subject, Grade and Student_Id. I am looking for output which is aggregated along the Subject. Something shown below.

Subject        A     B      C     D
———————————–
MATH         20    10    30    50
PHY            20    10    50    30
CHEM         30    20    50    10
BIO            30    10    20    50

Its not easy to aggregate along the subject using the group by statement and the case statement. (Atleast I dont know of any easy way!!!) But using the Pivot operator makes this very simple.

Running the above query displays the information as shown below.

UNPIVOT performs almost the reverse operation of PIVOT, by rotating columns into rows.

If you have a Gemplus (GemPC433 SL7) card reader then it works in Windows 7 OS. Gemplus card reader, GemPC433 SL7, is said to have installation issues in Windows 7 and is not expected to work as desired.

Contrary to reports, Gemplus (GemPC433 SL7) card reader works in Windows 7 OS. The installation in Windows 7 is same as in Vista. I tried it on Windows 7 (build 7000) 32-bit and it works.

Refer my previous post here for installing on Vista 32-bit.

/Vishnu

One of the helpful functionality of Google Toolbar has been the “Send to SMS” option. You can quickly SMS the information to your mobile device and continue reading on the go.

Looks like this option has been retired now. Below is the error message which shows up when you access the Send to SMS option.

Not very sure, what prompted Google to retire this useful feature. With the web fast becoming the new windows, this is like shooting a bullet in your foot. Google toolbar is a very handy extension of your browser if you prefer to search the web a lot, read news, check your gmail and like to satisfy your ego by checking your sites page rank.

If Google is really serious about this, then its time to update the toolbar.

/Vishnu

Here is a quick info for installing Gemplus GemPC433 SL7 Smart Card for Windows Vista (32 bit). When you connect gemplus card reader, Vista installs generic card drivers. Your smart card wont be detected with these generic drivers and you would need to install the unsigned drivers from their website.

Make sure you follow the instructions in their FAQ site. Connect the card reader to USB and in the device manager upgrade the drivers by pointing them to the latest drivers.

PS: Gemplus has merged with Axalto to form Gemalto.

As part of Search Engine Optimization strategy, Sitemaps provide a way for the crawlers to index your site. There are 2 types of Sitemaps, Human friendly sitemaps and Crawler friendly sitemap.

Human friendly sitemaps provide a textual map of the website which is being viewed. Some links could be buried deep in a site that could be easily located using the sitemap by humans. Example Microsoft PressPass Sitemap

Crawler Friendly Sitemaps are those which help the crawler to uncover deeplinks in the website and help them understand the site better.

Before Sitemap.org came into existence all major search engines like Google, Yahoo, AOL, MSN wanted web masters to format their feed for their crawlers. This made it extremely difficult for the webmasters to submit their updated content automatically to the search engines. Google then came up with http://Sitemaps.org. Sitemaps is an XML based format which is now supported by all major search engines. It is extensible and provides the search engines to better “understand” the website. Unlike the normal sitemap protocol, sitemaps.org protocol provides additional information to search engines like the change frequency of the page, last modified date of the file, the relative priority of a URL when compared to other URL’s in your site. This can help the crawler not only to index the site but also obtain meta information about the site. The sitemaps protocol can be found here

Interesting facts about Sitemaps.org

1. The protocol for sitemaps.org was developed by Google but the site is hosted with Yahoo!. A Whois lookup shows that the nameservers for sitemaps.org points to YNS1.YAHOO.COM and YNS2.YAHOO.COM. A good strategy to gather Yahoo support.
2. This really isn’t a fact per se, but good to know. The meta description in the Whois reads as “The Sitemaps protocol enables webmasters to information earch engine about pages on their site that are available for crawling”.

Most of the popular blogging platforms like WordPress, Community Server, Typepad, blogger etc have add-on’s which are SEO friendly.

/Vishnu

I am currently working on Search Engine Optimization for an online marketplace. I do have a brief idea about SEO but for this assignment I need to come up with best practices. There are a lot of techniques but one thing which caught my attention was Cloaking.

Cloaking is a technique by which different content is delivered by the website based on whether the request is made by a spider (search engine crawler) or a browser (user). Cloaking can be achieved either by finding out the IP address or the User Agent HTTP header request.

In IP address cloaking based on the well known IP address of spiders, content is served by the website. Most of the search engines spiders have a well known range of IP address using which they crawl the web. The website monitors and serves special content based on the IP addresses. The catch here is to find obtain the range of IP addresses of the spiders and target them. Pretty sure that popular search engines wont give away their list of IP addresses. This said, it wont be too hard for site webmaster/admins to find them out if they monitor the requests closely.

In User Agent HTTP header request technique, every requesting entity like web browser, crawler, mobile device and other clients identify themselves to the server by sending the ser agent type in the HTTP request.

This is my first post on SEO. Will be adding a lot more soon.

Happy Blogging

Wishing all the people, their friends, enemies, competitors reading this entry a very

Happy, Exciting and Competitive New Year…..

It has been a while since i posted some useful content to my blog. Apply polly logies for the infrequent entries to the blog. The year gone by has not been particularly bad. I had my fair share of luck. I do not really believe in any resolutions as they are always broken by me within the first two weeks. Never the less, i have promised my mom few thing(s) and expect that i would rise upto them.

I was quite busy the past few months working on Live Gadgets with a lot of help from my brother. There were a lot of things on my plate and i was not quite managing them well. I am currently working on getting a good hang on gadgets. I was named as an evangelist on Live platform in my organization and expected to take some sessions on them. This does require a great deal of commitment and hard work, to say the least.

Please do drop in some comments and suggestions on what kind of gadgets would interest you. I hope to put the gadget (a cricket score) i am working on for download once its in a working state and when i get a sign-off from my brother (who actually wrote the code!!! for me)

This bog has truly given me a lot of visibility (and appreciation) and helped me become more professional. My blog was voted as one of the BEST Developer Blog in India. Wow..So i am a Microsoft BlogStar. I never ever expected it to come my way. It’s my obligation to my blog to reciprocate the favor. So please feel free to send me your harsh comments in case you do not find the blog updated frequently

I believe one of the main reasons why the gadget stuff i am working on is taking more time than expected is because i am really not comfortable with Java Script. I am not trying to give any excuse here, but believe that these are the general views i found both online and off line.

Yes.. Thats right…
Study has shown that SQL Server is the MOST SECURE Database. It outbeats Oracle, MySQL, Sybase and DB2 in a study conducted by Enterprise Strategy Group in Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) data.

<Wiki>
CVE: The Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) list provides an index of standardized names for vulnerabilities and other information security exposures – CVE aims to standardize the names for all publicly known vulnerabilities and security exposures. The CVE database is operated by the MITRE corporation, and is sponsored by the Department of Homeland Security
</Wiki>

The study goes on the record saying that “ESG considers Microsoft, with proper execution, to be years ahead of Oracle and MySQL in producing secure and reliable database products“…which is definetly a shot in the arm for Microsoft. Microsoft is currently facing severe criticsm from its “ally” Symantec and McAfee for locking down its kernal in Vista and not “allowing” third party software to run properly.

A paper available at Microsoft website which compares SQL Server 2005 and Oracle 10g on Security shows that with the same level of security features in both databases, SQL Server 2005 is significantly cheaper to purchase and own than Oracle 10g for the same functionality. The paper also talks about “Which database is more secure?”. The interesting part is the way “secure” is defined. The paper says “Measures of how secure a database server is should include how many security bulletins, incidents, or advisories have been registered against the database. Security bulletins show the track record of the vendor regarding security“.

Going by the security bulletins, incidents, or advisories Oracle tops the list. I believe advisories, bulletins and incidents alone wouldn’t suffice. They are just couple of parameters in the complex equation. Nevertheless.. it still doesn’t take away anything from Microsoft.