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String-Matching help for SQL Server
The task of matching strings between heterogeneous systems, especially that of matching personal or company names or addresses, is not easy with SQL Server's limited set of built-in string SQL functions. Here is a C# CLR-Assembly (with source code) for SQL Server with some advanced string-handling functions that may help:
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LTrim - like Oracle's LTRIM function.
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InitCap - like Oracle's INITCAP function
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FlattenCharSet - Replace western characters with diacritics with best-choice, non-diacritic characters
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StripPunctuationMarks - Remove all punctiation marks from the given string.
AVI to DVD conversion
Directly Burn DVD's from .avi files
Here is a quick and simple-to-use utility to convert an AVI file to the weird intermediate files and to then write them all to a DVD. It is called avi2dvd and is written in BASH-shell. It is unlikely to run on Windows.
More about it here at https://sourceforge.net/projects/avi2dvd
How to open .bin & .cue Files?
So, you downloaded a torrent expecting a nice AVI- or MPG-file for instant-action AV entertainment, and all you got was a big .bin file and a funny little .cue file? Here's the Linux-way of how to extract the content from them:
How to open .daa Files?
Yet another bespoke file format that unsuccessfully attempts to futher the agenda of vendor lock-in: If you are running Windows, you need to purchase PowerISO from poweriso.com , if you are running X86-based Linux flavour, the same people offer a free program to read and write .daa files. Go figure...
How to open .nrg Files?
A well-meaning person gives you a .nrg file and you will not invest in a piece of expensive bespoke software to read it. After all, you run free, open-source software and never have and never will pay for software. What to do with this stupid .nrg file?
Unix Utilies for Windows
These utilities are particularly useful for installing Perl on your Windows PC. Download Perl for Windows from http://www.activeperl.com.
Product Quickcode Generator
How to generate a Base36 quick code sequence using the SHA2 hash
On a 'slowish' 2GHz machine it can generate 20,000 quickcodes per minute. The spread of the resulting quickcodes is near-perfectly even, which means that substrings of the quickcode can be used to construct a hashed directory tree for holding, for example, the huge amount of product image files associated with a product catalog. Using a hashed directory tree is a quick and efficient method to host millions of separate files for quick, random access, as most file systems only perform optimally with less than 1,000 contained in a directory
This deterministic techique uses a hash of the sequential Integer Id of an item to generate a typical product quickcode for it, as found in many shopping catalogues. Example of how a quickcode is generated from its primary key integer Id:
- 1 => 8M9LFLN2
- 2 => HZ40H3K0
- 3 => 02LUJYQ2
- etc..
You can download the Base36 Quickcode Generator test script, which demonstrates an implementation in Perl and MySQL.
Getting Oracle's SQLPlus Client to run on Linux
If you are running a Linux version that does not support RPM packages and you need to install Oracle's sqlplus client, you have two options to install it:
- If you have a DEBIAN-based Linux distro, download the RPM package and convert it to a DEB package using the alien utility. This can get a little complicated and requires you to unpack the .rpm file and then rebuild the pack of files into a .deb file. And then install it using your preferred DEB package installer.
- Download one of the .zip files from Oracle. Which ones, you ask? It is not obvious which ones to download and if you don't get the correct combination of files, you get errors such asĀ
sqlplus: error while loading shared libraries: libclntsh.so.21.1: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
when you try to run sqlplus. Here is the installation recipe for a full-fat installation of SQLPLUS:
Oracle DBMS_PIPE - why you should abandon it
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