Writing from my iPad

Posted in: General by Steve on May 26, 2010

This is my first post written directly on my iPad. This device has made our lives more interesting and has a lot uses for children. I’ve enjoyed the initial experience with the iPad and I think the rest of my family has as well. I would say the games and coloring style apps have been the most enjoyable, along with the ability to stream movies and videos.

The apps that I have installed on here are:

• Air Video – stream video from a server directly to the iPad
• Netflix – mandatory for video
• Plants vs. Zombies – my wife truly enjoys this game, much to my amusement
• Flight Control HD – I have a thing for planes
• RadarScope – Level 2 radar at your fingertips, along with Spotter Network integration make for an awesome experience
• X-Plane – again, an excellent flight simulator

The one thing I am surprised with is reading books. I thought that it would be different because of the backlit screen and my eyes would hurt, but I haven’t had any problems picking up the iPad to read a nice book on Python.

Overall, I am extremely happy we purchased the iPad.

UPDATE: I forgot to mention GoodReader which is an awesome app to manage documents.

How to Verify Your Stored Procedures

Posted in: Programming by Steve on May 5, 2010

One of the things I’ve been trying to do is to eliminate the unnecessary stored procedures from our project.  Currently, we have about 150 left, but a lot of them are still used.  Some of them are still left over and no longer are called from our application.  As I was building a new SQL install script, I was trying to run a script of all stored procedures in one database and create them all in a new one.  I found that some of them no longer would work because of changes we’ve made to the database that have broken these stored procedures without even knowing. 

I asked on twitter how this could be done and Argenis Fernandez (@afernandez) suggested that I look into a Powershell script to verify stored procedures still work.

After some investigation on how Powershell and SQL work together, I scraped together this script:

$server = "localhost";		# The SQL Server instance name
$database = "MyDatabase";		# The database name

# Load the SMO assembly
[System.Reflection.Assembly]::LoadWithPartialName("Microsoft.SqlServer.SMO") | out-null

# Create the SMO objects
$srv = New-Object "Microsoft.SqlServer.Management.SMO.Server" $server;
$db = New-Object ("Microsoft.SqlServer.Management.SMO.Database");

# Get the database
$db = $srv.Databases[$database];

# For each stored procedure in the database
foreach($proc in $db.StoredProcedures)
{
    # NOTE: my stored procedures are all prefixed with "web_"
    if ($proc.Name.StartsWith("web_"))
	{
        $proc.TextBody = $proc.TextBody;
        $proc.Alter();
    }
}

If any error occurs, it will display which procedure name did not get altered properly.

In my application, all my stored procedures that I use in the websites are prefixed with “web_”.  This made it easy to check if the procedures used still work.