SQL Server - when STATIC is DYNAMIC

My head hurts... according to MSDN documentation on CURSORS:

“Forward-only: The rows are not retrieved from the database until they are fetched”

“Static: The complete result set of a static cursor is built in tempdb when the cursor is opened”

which seems mutually exclusive, but

“SQL Server considers both forward-only and scroll as options that can be applied to static, keyset-driven, and dynamic cursors.”

and finally

“When a database API cursor attribute or property is set to forward-only, SQL Server implements this as a forward-only dynamic cursor.”

so specifying STATIC FORWARD ONLY gets implemented as DYNAMIC FORWARD_ONLY (no tempdb)
and STATIC alone gets the tempdb copy you’re (presumably) after…

Forward-only Cursors

Static Cursors

John Howard, Blogger?

For those not in sunny Australia, John Howard is our very long-serving Prime Minister (yes, we're still a democracy, it just seems like he's PM for life...)

Anyway, this 'unofficial' John Howard Blog is bloody funny...

[Sorry, I'll blog something tech-related again soon...]

Scrolling tables, fixed headers

A common Html display problem in enterprise applications is presenting lots of tabular data. Users are 'used' to Excel tables where they can always see the column headers as they scroll down a list.

MSDN has a useful example of a scrolling table with fixed header using HTC. It's IE-specific (of course) but seems to be fairly easy to implement. This does pretty much all I need, for now.

However, ActiveWidgets Grid is an awesome Excel-like grid view with column and row headers, plus icon/tooltip support. It's "somewhat" cross browser too (IE, Mox, FF but not Opera, Safari) and if I was really wanting to impress someone this is the one I'd use. One downside is the population of the table via Javascript arrays, which I suspect makes it impossible to do rowspan/colspan tricks which I often need.

WYSIWYG Editors in DHTML

I can't count the number of projects where the user's have asked for a text-input area "just like Microsoft Word". Inevitably they also ask for some specific feature or function that means the last control I used is not quite right.

Here is a list (for future reference) of some of the open source alternatives: Open Source WYSIWYG Through-The-Web Editors.

Of course, there's always RichTextBox if you want to pay (and get support!).

p.s. blogging has slowed dramatically in this new job. Hopefully it'll be more regular in the new year!