Introduction

Querying a database is just half of the battle. The other half is making the data that is pulled out of the table look pretty. Reports are used for those non-techie, higher ups that like it when things look pretty.

Using a debugger to help find errors will save you a consider amount of time. Eclipse is a great IDE because not only is it platform independent, but you can use it to program in many different languages. The features and plugins seem endless which is an added bonus.

The main reason why I like it is that it works on Linux. ;)

Views have two purposes:

• Simplify issuing complex SQL queries
• Restrict users' access to sensitive data.

Views are Database objects and are treated like tables. Unlike tables, views do not store any data. Views simply store a query.

Introduction

Linux is great in the respect that you have COMPLETE control over everything you do on the system. You can even control the mounting of drives. However, sometimes you may just want the system to mount it itself. I've read that many people were having problems with supermount and it is no longer mainstream.

This is where IVMan comes into play. Submount was removed from the Gentoo Portage as of 2nd of Janurary, 2007. As long as my system mounts a USB stick at when I plug it in, I'm a happy camper.

Introduction

At work we have a Core 2 demo running Windows Vista. This demo is not connected to the network because we don't want people coming in and changing the background image to display something obscene or pornographic. There is a neat little trick that I found one day while trying to figure out how I could reset the time until the user had to activate Windows Vista.

HTML Source EditorWord wrap Sub queries come in handy when you want to find a record but need to know what exactly to look for. For example, if you want to find all the items that are more expensive than a specific item. Instead of issuing two SELECT statements, you can use sub queries to find the answer in just one query.  

A function is a block of predefined code. Single-row functions return only a single row for each record processed. These functions include functions that deal with characters to dates.

Group functions are also called multiple-row functions. These functions return a result for a group of rows that they process. To add grouping capabilities the SELECT clause will have two new clauses GROUP BY and HAVING.

When you select data, there’s a good chance that you’re looking for something specific. In using the SELECT statement you can attach a WHERE clause to limit the data that you are looking through. If you’re very good and know what you’re looking for then you can use the WHERE clause to find exactly what you want.

Joining tables brings together data from two or more tables in one query in order to get all the information you need. There are six different types of joins: