The key to working with null values properly is to accommodate them consistently. Learn a few tricks that will help you do just that.

Routine maintenance can keep index fragmentation to a minimum—with some help from an index-defragmenting script.

You can't let a little thing like not knowing a database's structure keep you from your work. Without identifying tables and columns, you can still find specific values and columns.

From monitoring e-mail messages to distributing reports for users, SQL Server's database mail proves quite useful. Learn how to use it in SQL Server 2000 and SQL Server 2005/2008.

You can easily limit or group a recordset, but doing both to the same recordset takes a bit of hand coding. Find out how both SQL Server and MS Access can handle the task.

Discover the flexibility and power of using ANSI SQL to reshape and transform hierarchical structures.

This short introduction to .NET shows Access and SQL Server developers how to use a development tool to create connections to data and a user interface to manipulate that data.

Windows Communication Foundation is one of the most important features in the history of .NET. Not only does WCF provide a unified programming model for communications, it also promotes the use of interfaces and various recommended programming practices.

Although Android ships with several useful content providers, you can easily extend it and build your own.

A column alias seems like a great tool for referencing complex expressions, but SQL Server doesn't work that way. Learn a simple workaround.

Although adding multiprocessing capabilities to applications is labor-intensive and error-prone, adding multicore capability to SQL query processing can be automatic, benefiting huge numbers of applications with little developer effort.

Deleting all the data in a SQL Server database doesn't have to involve complex code. The undocumented stored procedure sp_MSForEachTable safely bypasses built-in limitations to accomplish this common task.

SQL Server's new FILESTREAM feature simplifies the process of keeping file-based data, such as images, in sync with relational data.

Determining which queries will provide the best performance for a given application often comes down to a simple question: Does Query X perform better than Query Y? Learn the tools and methods that can help you compare query response times in Oracle.

You can use SQL to connect or "mash-up" hierarchical structures, joining them at or below the root to create larger queryable hierarchical structures.

You likely will need to test data against SQL Server 2008 and SQL Server 2005, but ordinary backups are incompatible. Use SQL Server 2008's Generate SQL Server Scripts Wizard to push your SQL Server 2008 data back into SQL Server 2005.

Yahoo! has released a base platform that opens up Yahoo! user data via web standard APIs and also provides a framework for how developers, publishers, and advertisers can build applications on and off Yahoo!.

SQL does not support direct operations on matrices, but it does allow easy manipulations with matrices. Learn a few SQL techniques for performing some basic operations on matrices.

Maintaining a database often means schema changes. Before you change or delete anything, be sure to check for dependent objects.

Visual Studio 2008 and .NET 3.5 give developers substantially increased data access options.