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There are several ways that you can store viewstate in a database (rather than in a hidden field on the page), but there are very few examples of how to actually do it on the web. Maybe that’s because there aren’t many genuine reasons for changing the default behaviour. You certainly should think twice before changing such a fundamental element of your web applications. This article shows you how to do it if you need to.

Use these functions in Oracle when you want to remove the time portion of a date value. This is useful if you want to select values for a complete day, regardless of the time, for example.

Hashes are a vital technique for validating data that has been passed between two systems. Quite often, the simplest implementation of a hash in one language won't necessarily produce the same hash-string as another language. This article gives you code snippets for three languages that produce identical hashes for any given data.

This brief article explains how you can call executables and scripts from your Ruby program.

This snippet shows you how to detect which network ports are in use on the current machine from a Ruby script

If you select from multiple tables using a list of comma separated tables after your FROM keyword (E.G., SELECT * FROM table1, table2) this article explains how to use the far better ANSI standard INNER JOIN to make your queries more readable and, therefore, maintainable.

IN and NOT IN are often the cause of otherwise inexplicably slow procedures in SQL Server. This article briefly explains why they should be avoided and how to better implement the same functionality.

Indexes are an incredibly important tool that, if used correctly, will help you see huge performance improvements in your database. This article takes you through the basics.

When you write stored procedures, which are an excellent way of encapsulating functionality and improving performance, you should avoid the use of EXEC and EXECUTE keywords at all costs. This article explains why.

Learn how to page data inside SQL Server using the rank() function to create virtual row numbers for your recordsets. For high volume databases or large recordsets, this method is significantly faster than returning all of the data to your client application and paging it in memory