Change Implementation of Select, Update, and Insert in SQL Server - sql-server

To give you the question first: I want to know if it is possible to create a stored procedure or something in SQL Server that intercepts and translates SELECT, INSERT, and UPDATE commands. Now for the explanation:
I am writing a web application to replace an old desktop app. Its a business app which is basically a database interface with reports and searches and all the good ol' CRUD. The new and old apps need to live in harmony together since some customers may be using the old and new together to access the same DB.
My problem is that the original database format stores most data in a single blob of text (1 nvarchar(MAX) field). I want to add functionality to search on fields stored in the blob, but it will be cumbersome and slow. I would like to update the database format without changing the desktop app at all, hence the question above.
It occurs to me that I could do this on the client by writing a wrapper class for the data access object and then do a bulk replace in the client code to reference the wrapper, but I want to know what my options are on the server as well.
In case anyone wants to know, the old app is in VB6 and the new in C#.
EDIT
Alright, so it looks like if I do anything on the server side we are looking at adding stored procedures and then updating the client VB6 code to reference the stored procs. Do something like a bulk replace of SELECT with sp_oldselect ... To return the data in a different format. I'm guessing a client-side wrapper would be the best solution for the time-being. Old apps die hard.

You can create a bunch of views for the old client and let it to query those views. It will be slow as hell in most cases, but it can 'replace' the select query. For updates and insert.. well.. instead of triggers on the views could help is some cases, but it will require lots of processing.
However my suggestion is to provide exactly the same functionality in the web app and deprecate the desktop app. When the desktop app's share is low enough, stop supporting it. From this point, you are (mostly) free to add new functions, upgrade the database schema, etc.

I agree with JonH, that alot can go wrong here, but you can try and read up on the INSTEAD OF Triggers in MS SQL server here: https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms179288(v=sql.105).aspx

Related

Create tabels in Hibernate auto or manually?

Im currently developing a servlet homepage (spring + hibernate + mysql).
Im at the moment using the Hibernate property hibernate.hbm2ddl.auto set to update.
This is working fine and Hibernate creates and updates my tables.
However, Ive have read on multiple places that this is not recommended in production and that it is unsafe.
But if I dont put this option my tables is not created, and I really don't want to create my tabels manually on the server. I got limited time working on this alone.
How is this usually done? It's seems like it is quite much work to add all tables manually imo.
In production, you typically have already existing tables with a large amount of data that you don't want to lose, and that you want to migrate to the new schema. Hibernate can't do that automagically for you. It doesn't know that the data that was previously in column A must now be in the new column B.
So you'll need to create a migration script. Of course, you can use Hibernate to generate the new schema for you in development, see what the differences with the old schema are, and create your script thanks to that. But yes, having an app in production and migrate it needs some work to be done.

How do I elegantly import an Excel file into Sql Server via a Coldfusion HTML form?

Does anyone have an elegant suggestion for how to get the contents of an Excel spreadsheet into SQL Server via a web form? I need to allow our clients to upload modest amounts of structured data, and I need that data to ultimately reside in a sql table. I really can't expect the clientele to produce anything but an Excel file, but I could require that it be an xlsx.
The web app is written in Coldfusion; it doesn't need to be able to handle huge numbers of simultaneous requests, but I don't want to consider some sort of server-side batch job processing or shunt the user to an asp.net page (which is what we are doing now).
Any recommendations (or examples of how others are successfully doing this) would be appreciated. Due to the sensitivity of the data, we really can't do anything to compromise the security of the web or sql servers.
If you are using CF9, then you could easily use the cfspreadsheet tag too. I mention this one specifically because Shawn's link did not (presumably due to its being relatively new on the CF scene). Here's the livedoc link: http://help.adobe.com/en_US/ColdFusion/9.0/CFMLRef/WSc3ff6d0ea77859461172e0811cbec17cba-7f87.html
For full use, I would create a web form with a standard file upload field. On the backend handling the form submission, get a copy of the file with
<cffile action="upload" destination="uploaded.xls".....>
Then use:
<cfspreadsheet action="read" query="myExcelData" src="uploaded.xls" ...>
At which point, your spreadsheet content will be available as a query object. You can then loop over this query, running insert queries into your sql server each time you loop. That should do it.
Here are the most notable options to help point you in the right direction; choose what you are most comfortable with (Source: Charlie Arehart).
CFXL
JXLS
CFX_Excel
My personal recommendation is to go the CFX_Excel route. Although a commercial product, it will grant you the most functionality/flexibility of the options listed.

Access 2007 to SQL server file upload?

I have an Access 2007 database with an attachments facility. Currently the client may upload files locally but the files cannot be accessed elsewhere. I have been able to carry out a similar operation when developing on a web based system however I cannot seem to do it on an Access 2007 database and I am unsure as to whether it is even possible. Basically the system needs to connect to the SQL server online and upload the file although the database is not online itself. I would be grateful for any pointers!
I have faced this situation. Here are your choices:
Use Access attachment field in a shared ACCDB -- won't work "online" very well, but you could park the ACCDB on your LAN and make it a separate back-end ACCDB shared by all. Your post didn't say whether your users are either local or "online" -- and whether "online" meant web.
Use VarChar(Max) (aka BLOB) fields in SQL-Server to store the attachments. But, you can't populate these easily from Access. Assuming you control the server where SQL-Server is running, you can use ADO in Access to upload a VarChar(Max) using the bulkinsert T-SQL command. This works pretty well and it's easy.
Create an upload web page. Use iExplorer automation (i.e, create an iExplorer object) in VBA to navigate to that page, fill it in and press the upload button. For security reasons, you cannot use automation to fill in a file upload control, but you can use sendkeys. This doesn't work perfectly -- sometimes you have to repeat the process once or twice, but it works pretty well if it's invoked by a user who can validate it's working. This is what I did -- easiest solution.
Best solution probably is to create a web service using WCF to handle the upload. There are plenty of posts on how to encode and decode byte arrays to store files as VarChar(Max). It works extremely well. Unfortunately, Access cannot directly consume web services as far as I've been able to tell, so you would have to write a small vb.net program to do this and call it from Access.
You could store the files/attachments outside of SQL/Server - just on the server, and store only the links/URL's for those files in Access. You could make each one launchable. This is easy but harder to control the security.
You can use Sharepoint to store/share the attachments. That can work pretty well depending on the size of the attachments and your connectivity. It's built to support this.
Access allows multiple attachments in one record. SQL/Server doesn't support this. So, if you can split your ACCDB into a front-end for the programs only and back-end ACCDB that is sharable by your users to contain the data/attachments, that is by far the easiest answer.

Best strategy to initially populate a Grails database backend

I'd like to know your approach/experiences when it's time to initially populate the Grails DB that will hold your app data. Assuming you have CSVs with data, is is "safer" to create a script (with whatever tool fits you) that:
1.-Generates the Bootstrap commands with the domain classes, run it in test or dev environment and then use the native db commands to export it to prod?
2.-Create the DB's insert script assuming GORM's version = 0 and incrementing manually the soon-to-be autogenerated IDs ?
My fear is that the second approach may lead to inconsistencies for hibernate will have the responsability for the IDs generation and there may be something else I'm missing.
Thanks in advance.
Take a look at this link. This allows you to run groovy scripts in the normal grails context giving you access to all grails features including GORM. I'm currently importing data from a legacy database and have found that writing a Groovy script using the Groovy SQL interface to pull out the data then putting that data in domain objects appears to be the easiest thing to do. Once you have the data imported you just use the commands specific to your database system to move that data to the production database.
Update:
Apparently the updated entry referenced from the blog entry I link to no longer exists. I was able to get this working using code at the following link which is also referenced in the comments.
http://pastie.org/180868
Finally it seems that the simplest solution is to consider that GORM as of the current release (1.2) uses a single sequence for all auto-generated ids. So considering this when creating whatever scripts you need (in the language of your preference) should suffice. I understand it's planned for 1.3 release that every table has its own sequence.

Web-App : Keeping trace of the version of the application in database?

We are building a webapp which is shipped to several client as a debian package. Each client runs his own server. But the update and support is done by us.
We make regular releases of the product, with a clean version number. Most of the users get an automatic update (by Puppet), some others don't.
We want to keep a trace of the version of the application (in order to allow the user to check the version in an "about" section, and for our support to help the user more accurately).
We plan to store the version of the code and the version of the base in our database, and to keep the info up to date automatically.
Is that a good idea ?
The other alternative we see is a file.
EDIT : The code and database schema are updated together. ( if we update to version x.y.z , both code and database go to x.y.z )
Using a table to track every change to a schema as described in this post is a good practice that I'd definitely suggest to follow.
For the application, if it is shipped independently of the database (which is not clear to me), I'd embed a file in the package (and thus not use the database to store the version of the web application).
If not and thus if both the application and the database versions are maintained in sync, then I'd just use the information stored in the database.
As a general rule, I would have both, DB version and application version. The problem here is how "private" is the database. If the database is "private" to the application, and user never modifies the schema then your initial solution is fine. In my experience, databases which accumulate several years of data stop being private, it means that users add a table or two and access data using some reporting tool; from that point on the database is not exclusively used by the application any more.
UPDATE
One more thing to consider is users (application) not being able to connect to the DB and calling for support. For this case it would be better to have version, etc.. stored on file system.
Assuming there are no compelling reasons to go with one approach or the other, I think I'd go with keeping them in the database.
I'd put them in both places. Then when running your about function you quickly check that they are both the same, and if they aren't you can display extra information about the version mismatch. If they're the same then you will only need to display one of them.
I've generally found users can do "clever" things like revert databases back to old versions by manually copying directories around "because they can" so defensively dealing with it is always a good idea.

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