How to extract our stored procedure code/text definition on MS SQL Server

I had a very interesting situation last week when visited one of my customer. Situation was they host their application on a server at their US headquarter and it run a SQL Server 2005, while all developer engine at Jakarta using SQL 2008. We got an issue on application which resulted on wrong calculation, after some time analyze I found we need to investigate the stored procedure in used. But, big concern was none of developer have latest version of the stored procedure. Thus, we need to extract it from US Server.  It got weird when we able to connect to US Server but unable to iterate SQL Server 2005 entity though we logged in as database owner. Due to limited time, so I asked the developer to run an ad-hoc command to extract stored procedure definition from US Server. Response I got was “how to do so ?”


For some developer who already spoiled by luxury of Microsoft Tools, most of the time, ad-hoc command become a history, thus how SQL Server works and how to manage it on console mode become another legend.


On every SQL Server Database, system will create system table called sysobjects to store all objects within respective database, this table will store information about objectid, object name, object type, etc. Respective to that object, there is syscomments table to maintain comment or text definition of specific object, it was referenced to sysobject through … yes, objectid field.


Now how to get code definition of a stored procedure:

Traditionally we can use below command

select text 
from syscomments c
inner join sysobjects o on c.id=o.id
where o.name like 'your_sp_name'

But when it gave a big text, result will be truncated so it would be difficult for us to read it. Nah, there is a ad-hoc command already prepared by SQL Server to perform such task, it was called sp_helptext


So what we need to, is just type below command on console

sp_helptext 'your_sp_name'

And voilla, all the magic to extract code/text definition of stored procedure will be taken care with easy.

What is CAPTCHA ?

As a Website owner you may find you're getting spam in your registration forms, blog and forum comment areas or in your email inbox. And although sometimes it may feel like you spend a lot of your time dealing with these annoyances, there are tools to help minimize or eliminate spambot issues. Many business are adding CAPTCHA codes to their sites in order to help combat this kind of spam.

A CAPTCHA is a program that protects against bots by generating and grading tests that humans can pass but current computer programs cannot. The term CAPTCHA is an acronym for "Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart," trademarked in 2000 by Luis von Ahn, Manuel Blum, Nicholas Hopper and John Langford of Carnegie Mellon University, who developed the first CAPTCHA.

A common type of CAPTCHA requires the user to type the letters of a distorted image, sometimes with the addition of an obscured sequence of letters or digits that appears on the screen. This is a simple problem for humans, but a very hard problem for computers that have to use character recognition.

CAPTCHA can be used to monitor and solve many spam-related problems like preventing comment spam in blogs, protecting Web site registration, protecting email addresses from Web scrapers looking to add to spamming lists, ensuring that only humans can vote in online polls, preventing dictionary attacks in password systems as well as stopping search engine bots from crawling unindexed sites.

On the official CAPTCHA Web site (captcha.net) you can download and install a free CAPTCHA code provided by the reCAPTCHA Project that can help with decreasing spam-related issues and enable you to focus on other aspects of your business. ReCAPTCHA also enables you install an audio component to the test, making it user-friendly for the visually-impaired as well.

Some advantages to this code is that is a Web service, which means that all the images are generated and graded by reCAPTCHA's servers and can automatically update whenever a security vulnerability is found. ReCAPTCHA also has an IP address filtering and detection system that flags down IP addreses that solve too many CAPTCHAs in a certain period of time.

Easy-to-install plugins are available for WordPress, MediaWiki, PHP, Perl, Python and other environments. The CAPTCHA code is free for personal as well as commercial Web sites, but if you wish to install a non-branded code, you can purchase it for $160 per year

Resource:
Official CAPTCHA Website
Google ReCAPTCHA Project
http://www.thewhir.com/article-central/Working_With_CAPTCHA

Best android tablet on market

If you looking for a table but non an Apple-Fans or perhaps with a very tight budget on hand, then Android is the way to go. For a year back, many manufacturer decided to be contender on Android war, either on phone device or on table device. This competition is good for us as customer where we have much option to evaluate on, but also little bit maze for person who don’t want to spend some of their time to review, wrong information may lead them to wrong purchase of Android tablet. Well, lucky for them if they read this post because here we would like to show them best android tablet available on market.

So which tablets are the most tempting ? let’s find out