March 18, 2008

The Baker’s Dozen: 13 Tips for Querying OLAP Databases with MDX

DX is just like Transact-SQL, right? MDX is English-like and therefore easy to learn, right? Different software tools offer MDX generators and therefore I don’t need to learn MDX, right? MDX isn’t that popular, right? Well, just like the punch line of the old Hertz car rental commercial, “Not exactly.”

Autocomplete Combo Boxes

When you develop an application in Microsoft Access, your combo boxes will, by default, incorporate autocomplete. However, Visual Basic does not include this intrinsic support. If you want autocomplete in VB, you’ve got to do it yourself. This tip shows you how. First, you’ll need to add some methods to

Find Out What Applications Transmit Data from Your Computer

This tip can help you determine if your computer is hosting spyware that sends your information to another server. The NETSTAT command can show the list of running applications in your computer, along with other details such as the port number, the IP address used, the protocol, and so on.

Trigger Efficiency in Oracle

The documentation for Oracle 9.2 and previous versions contains the following paragraph: “AFTER row triggers are slightly more efficient than BEFORE row triggers. With BEFORE row triggers, affected data blocks must be read (logical read, not physical read) once for the trigger and then again for the triggering statement.“ For