ADO.Net synchronization services filter - vb.net

I have a VB.Net windows application in Visual Studio 2010 that I want to use ADO.Net synchronization services and only synchronize a subset of the data in each table. The main database with all of the data is in SQL Server 2008 R2, the LocalDataCache is using Compact SQL. I have found several examples like: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb726003(v=sql.100).aspx#Y1947 but they are very confusing.
If I have a table in SQL Server that has rows of data in it for several users, but I only want to see 1 user's data, I want to only synchronize this one users data. The primary key of the table is a GUID, I want to set the Filter Criteria to be something like: UserID = 'A34D81B5-EF3F-4B57-B795-F7F2D3B9DBA0'
I've looked at this and cannot get it to work for me:
Sync Framework : Can I Sync only a subset of my tables?
All of the examples I have found seem to be making this way more difficult than it seems like it should be. Does anyone have a simple example of how to bidirectionally keep SQL CE in sync using a filter like this?
I have added the item: Local Database Cache and it works great if I want to synchronize the entire database to the Compact SQL, but I don't want all of the rows of data. I want all of the columns, but want to filter the rows that it keeps in sync.
None of the code snippets that I have found work end to end... they are all very vague and this is totally new to me. I have never use Compact SQL before.
Thanks!

Related

SQL and Filemaker Pro 13 working together

I've been handed an interesting question in that an Apple centric user would be keen to run databases on Filemaker Pro and we already have several running on MS SQL.
FM Pro is visually stunning and as a front end to work with customers would look good, but I'm more SQL at heart.
Does anybody use both?
Can you easily run tasks between SQL and FM Pro to update data to FM Pro (say overnight)?
Has anybody made the change from SQL to FM Pro for any purpose and found it to be ok?
Thanks in advance
To expand on user4166144's answer a bit, you can add MS SQL as an external data source to FileMaker using ODBC. (See "Using FileMaker Pro, I want to create a live connection to a MS SQL Server, Oracle or MySQL data source.")
This will let you base layouts on an MS SQL table just as though it was a native FileMaker table. That is, the data will be "live", with no need for over-night copying about.
There are some limitations to ODBC connections, which will probably be irrelevant in your case. Mostly, ODBC data sources in FileMaker don't get all the FileMaker goodies in Manage Database. Tables from ODBC sources are "shadow tables". For example, if you delete a field ("column") in FileMaker, it doesn't get deleted in the SQL database. However, creating, editing, and deleting records all work as normal. You can even add tables from ODBC sources to the relationship graph, which is the primary way that you get data from multiple tables in FileMaker.
FileMaker is a little hard to wrap your head around coming from an SQL background. It's meant for rapid application development, and as such it has certain paradigms in mind. Here are a few things to know that I hope will help:
Every user interface ("Layout") in FileMaker is based on a table occurrence. The body of a layout represents a single record in that table occurrence. Every script, calculation and related piece of data is calculated from the perspective of that single record in that single table occurrence. That is, a layout is a "cursor".
There is no (sane) FileMaker way to do the equivalent of an SQL "OR" when it comes to the Relationship Graph.
FileMaker 12 has two features with very similar names. It has a calculation function "ExecuteSQL", which allows you to run SELECT statements on table occurrences in FileMaker; that includes ODBC sources. It also has a script step called "Execute SQL", which is handy for running arbitrary SQL against an ODBC data source. This latter is probably going to be very useful for you.
It's somewhat hard to get the results of SQL queries onto FileMaker layouts in any kind of elegant way. Generally, you need to write the results to a global field, a global variable, or a regular field. If you want to display tabular data from an SQL query in a decent kind of way, you will need to generate HTML and spit it into data url in a Web Viewer element on a layout (i.e., prefix the HTML with "data:text/html,")
FileMaker, since version 9, includes the ability to connect to a number of SQL databases without resorting to using SQL, including MySQL, SQL Server, and Oracle. This requires installation of the SQL database ODBC driver to connect to a SQL database. SQL databases can be used as data sources in FileMaker’s relationship graph, thus allowing the developer to create new layouts based on the SQL database; create, edit, and delete SQL records via FileMaker layouts and functions; and reference SQL fields in FileMaker calculations and script steps. It is a cross platform relational database application.
Versions from FileMaker Pro 5.5 onwards also have an ODBC interface.
FileMaker 12 introduced a new function, ExecuteSQL, which allows the user to perform an SQL query against the FileMaker database to retrieve data, but not for modification or deletion, or schema changes.

Detecting modified pages in SQL Server tables

Is there a way to check if an SQL Server table (or even better, a page in that table) was modified since a certain moment? E.g. SQL differential backup uses dirty flags to know which parts of data were changed since last backup, and resets these flags after a successful backup.
Is there any way to get this functionality from MS SQL Server? I.e. if I want to cache certain aggregate values on a database table which sometimes changes, how would I know when to invalidate the cache? Or is the only way to do it to implement it programmatically and keep tract of this while writing to the database?
I am using C# .NET 4.5 to access SQL Server 2008 R2 through NHibernate.
I suggest you think about your problem in terms of application layer data caching instead of SQL Server low-level data pages. You can use SqlDependency or QueryNotification in your C# code to get notified of changes to the underlying data. Note that this requires ServericeBroker be enabled in the SQL Server database and there are some restrictions the on queries that qualify for notification.
See http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/529016/NHibernate-Second-Level-Caching-Implementation for an example of using this it with NHibernate.

Create SQL Script to Change Old Database to Current One

I'm creating the front-end for a project and I made a copy of the back-end database from the company's server and put it on my computer. I needed to make some changes (a few new tables and two new columns in an existing table) for security roles and other things so I duplicated the copied database and made my changes on the new one.
I want to deploy my project to the company's server now but we need to modify the original back-end database. I need to generate a SQL script that finds the changes between the old-database and my newer database, which can be run on the old database to create the new tables and columns. The script should retain the data from the old database and NOT add any junk/testing data I made in my new database.
By the way, I'm using SQL Server 2008 R2 and the old database on the server is on 2005. I've been looking around for utilities to use and found tablediff. However, it looks like it will copy the data and I can't see an argument on the information page to toggle this.
I'm sure it's simple but I'm not really sure how to do this. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks.
By far the solution I trust most to handle schema comparisons is Red Gate's SQL Compare:
http://www.red-gate.com/products/sql-development/sql-compare/
It has a companion called Data Compare which is designed specifically for data. You can grab the free trial to see if it does what you need in this case.
There are other options as well, for example SQL Server Data Tools has this functionality, though I haven't tested it to any degree that I could compare feature sets, performance, etc.
I've also blogged about why you want to use a tool and just pay for this functionality, rather than solve it programmatically yourself. The post also mentions a variety of alternatives if budget is a primary blocker:
http://bertrandaaron.wordpress.com/2012/04/20/re-blog-the-cost-of-reinventing-the-wheel/

Easy database IDE

I'm looking for an IDE or "visual editor" for some basic table manipulation.
I have a few tables, ~100K entries each. Most of them share two columns that together compose a UNIQUE PRIMARY KEY. These tables are static (they are just old record data), so no "online" or code interface is needed.
To be honest I only wish Excel or something like that could handle so many rows, since I want to perform simple tasks (e.g. erase a column, sort by column). What tool in your experienced is the most "Excel-like" for static tables?
Try Microsoft Access.
You can import or link to external data sources and access has lots of tools available to work with the data.
Using this method you will be able to do the following
View the data so that you can filter & sort the data.
write custom queries against the data (using a visual designer or SQL).
Add, edit and delete data (providing you have edit, delete privileges on the data source)
Write reports using the linked data.
Also, tables in Access 2007 and upwards look very much like Excel spreadsheets and as this is in the Microsoft office suite there are plenty of tools to export the data between Access and Excel.
phpmyadmin imo can serve as a good visual editor for what you need (though its 'online' and needs a running webserver)
DBDesignerFork is open source, free, and can reverse engineer your database to build the model.
You can then switch in to Query Mode and it will help you build queries from the table diagram.
You mention you want to be able to "erase a column, sort by column" these are two very different things. The sort is easily handled using an OREDER BY in your SELECT statements. Dropping columns can also be done in SQL using the ALTER TABLE command but remeber there is no easy "undo" unless you start wrapping your changes in transactions.
To sum up, you should forget the Excel comparison and learn SQL :)

show relationships like Access

Is there a way to show table relationships as can be done in Access? Consider two tables:
Services
serviceid
application id
Application
application id
application name
I have already set up the diagram.
When opening the table service id I want to see the related application details like in Access.
Is this possible?
First of all, you an always use access to connect to SQL Server and see relationships through it.
The built in database diagram feature will also show relationships, as you describe. You can find it under the database in question in the diagrams node.
Here is an article about different options to produce an ERD.
Update:
In order to see results, I would suggest using access to connect to SQL Server, as described in the link above.
The SQL Server GUI does not have this facility, and if you want to see results from several tables you need to write the SQL queries that will generate the wanted data.
You could also create a VIEW:
CREATE VIEW ServicesApplication AS
SELECT S.ServiceID, S.ApplicationID, A.ApplicationName
FROM Services AS S
LEFT JOIN Applications AS A
ON S.ApplicationID = A.ApplicationID
That way you can always access the coupled data easily by manipulating the ServicesApplication view instead of the separate tables.
SQL 2008 doesn't have anything built in to provide that functionality. Almost sounds like you're looking to trouble shoot an application by looking at database entries...if thats true I'd recommend learning tsql well enough to write these statements as you need and not rely on another application to provide a visual interface. heh, if I'm completely wrong with that, ignore me :)
If you still want the 3rd party application route...I beleive TOAD has that functionality within it, though I've never connected it to a MS SQL 2008 server before. There are other third party applications out there that will provide this functionality, though I imagine they aren't all free. If you're looking for a free solution and already have Access going, Oded probably has the best idea here...connect MS access to the SQL 2008 server (linked tables) and use MS access to provide the features you want from ms access :)