database column not compared - asp.net

I am saving all kinds of usernames and passwords in one table, however to differentiate the category there is third column that represents either he is clerk or administrator or teacher etc....the code is comparing username and password well but the third comparison is always returning false
here is my code
if (reader.GetString(0).Equals(password.Text))
{
if (reader.GetString(1).ToString().Equals("Clerk"))
Response.Redirect("clerkmain.aspx");
else
status.InnerHtml="You are not Allowed to Login";}
while the third column in this row is exactly named "Clerk" with datatype of varchar

With SQL you will find that the Equal operator and for that matter (even Select distinct) will not properly distinguish between a value and the same value with trailing spaces. In certain cases, you may need to do some further checking / processing (Trim, len, etc.) OR use LIKE, which follows a different process. You can look at https://stackoverflow.com/a/28682838/1662973 for more info and background.
Glad it so sorted.

Related

How to make values unique in cassandra

I want to make unique constraint in cassandra .
As i want to all the value in my column be unique in my column family
ex:
name-rahul
phone-123
address-abc
now i want that i this row no values equal to rahul ,123 and abc get inserted again on seraching on datastax i found that i can achieve it by doing query on partition key as IF NOT EXIST ,but not getting the solution for getting all the 3 values uniques
means if
name- jacob
phone-123
address-qwe
this should also be not inserted into my database as my phone column has the same value as i have shown with name-rahul.
The short answer is that constraints of any type are not supported in Cassandra. They are simply too expensive as they must involve multiple nodes, thus defeating the purpose of having eventual consistency in first place. If you needed to make a single column unique, then there could be a solution, but not for more unique columns. For the same reason - there is no isolation, no consistency (C and I from the ACID). If you really need to use Cassandra with this type of enforcement, then you will need to create some kind of synchronization application layer which will intercept all requests to the database and make sure that the values are unique, and all constraints are enforced. But this won't have anything to do with Cassandra.
I know this is an old question and the existing answer is correct (you can't do constraints in C*), but you can solve the problem using batched creates. Create one or more additional tables, each with the constrained column as the primary key and then batch the creates, which is an atomic operation. If any of those column values already exist the entire batch will fail. For example if the table is named Foo, also create Foo_by_Name (primary key Name), Foo_by_Phone (primary key Phone), and Foo_by_Address (primary key Address) tables. Then when you want to add a row, create a batch with all 4 tables. You can either duplicate all of the columns in each table (handy if you want to fetch by Name, Phone, or Address), or you can have a single column of just the Name, Phone, or Address.

Reason to use anything other than RecId as a clustered index

Is there any reason to use an index other than RecId (SurrogateKey in AX2012) as the clustered index?
Confirmed by a quick Google search (*), one should consider at least 4 criteria when deciding on clustered indexes:
Index must be unique.
Index must be narrow (As few fields as possible - since these would be copied to every other index).
Index must be static (As updating the index field value(s) will cause SQL server to physically move the record to a new location)
Index must be ordered (Ascending / Descending).
RecId adheres to all of the above, in a better way than any index you can create yourself. Any index you create yourself will violate at least the 2nd and/or the 4th, since it would automatically include DataAreaId.
What I think...
Could it be that the option to set this is just a legacy property from AX3.0 or lower, and that its use could be deprecated now?
*TechNet SQL Server Index Design Guide and Effective Clustered Indexes
While RecId is a good choice, you can make a shorter key on say an int on a global table (SaveDataPerCompany = No).
Access patterns matters, if you often access your customers by account number, you might as well store the records in that order.
Also, if you only have one index as is often the case for group and parameter tables, you are not punished for having a longer key, it will need storage somewhere anyway.
See also What do Clustered and Non clustered index actually mean?

Is this normal behavior for a unique index in Sqlite?

I'm working with SQLite in Flash.
I have this unique index:
CREATE UNIQUE INDEX songsIndex ON songs ( DiscID, Artist, Title )
I have a parametised recursive function set up to insert any new rows (single or multiple).
It works fine if I try to insert a row with the same DiscID, Artist and Title as an existing row - ie it ignores inserting the existing row, and tells me that 0 out of 1 records were updated - GOOD.
However, if, for example the DiscId is blank, but the artist and title are not, a new record is created when there is already one with a blank DiscId and the same artist and title - BAD.
I traced out the disc id prior to the insert, and Flash is telling me it's undefined. So I've coded it to set anything undefined to "" (an empty string) to make sure it's truly an empty string being inserted - but subsequent inserts still ignore the unique index and add a brand new row even though the same row exists.
What am I misunderstanding?
Thanks for your time and help.
SQLite allows NULLable fields to participate in UNIQUE indexes. If you have such an index, and if you add records such that two of the three columns have identical values and the other column is NULL in both records, SQLite will allow that, matching the behavior you're seeing.
Therefore the most likely explanation is that despite your effort to INSERT zero-length strings, you're actually still INSERTing NULLs.
Also, unless you've explicitly included OR IGNORE in your INSERT statements, the expected behavior of SQLite is to throw an error when you attempt to insert a duplicate INDEX value into a UNIQUE INDEX. Since you're not seeing that behavior, I'm guessing that Flash provides some kind of wrapper around SQLite that's hiding the true behavior from you (and could also be translating empty strings to NULL).
Larry's answer is great. To anyone having the same problem here's the SQLite docs citation explaining that in this case all NULLs are treated as different values:
For the purposes of unique indices, all NULL values are considered
different from all other NULL values and are thus unique. This is one
of the two possible interpretations of the SQL-92 standard (the
language in the standard is ambiguous). The interpretation used by
SQLite is the same and is the interpretation followed by PostgreSQL,
MySQL, Firebird, and Oracle. Informix and Microsoft SQL Server follow
the other interpretation of the standard, which is that all NULL
values are equal to one another.
See here: https://www.sqlite.org/lang_createindex.html

Dataset column always returns -1

I have a SQL stored proc that returns a dataset to ASP.NET v3.5 dataset. One of the columns in the dataset is called Attend and is a nullable bit column in the SQL table. The SELECT for that column is this:
CASE WHEN Attend IS NULL THEN -1 ELSE Attend END AS Attend
When I execute the SP in Query Analyzer the row values are returned as they should be - the value for Attend is -1 is some rows, 0 in others, and 1 in others. However, when I debug the C# code and examine the dataset, the Attend column always contains -1.
If I SELECT any other columns or constant values for Attend the results are always correct. It is only the above SELECT of the bit field that is behaving strangely. I suspect it has something to do with the type being bit that is causing this. So to test this I instead selected "CONVERT(int, Attend)" but the behavior is the same.
I have tried using ExecuteDataset to retrieve the data and I have also created a .NET Dataset schema with TableAdapter and DataTable. Still no luck.
Does anyone know what is the problem here?
Like you, I suspect the data type. If you can change the data type of Attend, change it to smallint, which supports negative numbers. If not, try changing the name of the alias from Attend to IsAttending (or whatever suits the column).
Also, you can make your query more concise by using this instead of CASE:
ISNULL(Attend, -1)
You've suggested that the Attend field is a bit, yet it contains three values (-1,0,1). A bit, however, can only hold two values. Often (-1, 0) when converted to an integer, but also possible (0, 1), depending on whether the BIT is considered signed (two's compliment) or unsigned (one's compliment).
If your client (the ASP code) is converting all values for that field to a BIT type then both -1 and 1 will likely show as the same value. So, I would ensure two things:
- The SQL returns an INTEGER
- The Client isn't converting that to a BIT
[Though this doesn't explain the absence of 0's]
One needs to be careful with implicit conversion of types. When not specifying explicitly double check the precidence. Or, to be certain, explicitly specify every type...
Just out of interest, what do you get when using the following?
CASE [table].attend
WHEN NULL THEN -2
WHEN 0 THEN 0
ELSE 2
END

What exactly are hashtables?

What are they and how do they work?
Where are they used?
When should I (not) use them?
I've heard the word over and over again, yet I don't know its exact meaning.
What I heard is that they allow associative arrays by sending the array key through a hash function that converts it into an int and then uses a regular array. Am I right with that?
(Notice: This is not my homework; I go too school but they teach us only the BASICs in informatics)
Wikipedia seems to have a pretty nice answer to what they are.
You should use them when you want to look up values by some index.
As for when you shouldn't use them... when you don't want to look up values by some index (for example, if all you want to ever do is iterate over them.)
You've about got it. They're a very good way of mapping from arbitrary things (keys) to arbitrary things (values). The idea is that you apply a function (a hash function) that translates the key to an index into the array where you store the values; the hash function's speed is typically linear in the size of the key, which is great when key sizes are much smaller than the number of entries (i.e., the typical case).
The tricky bit is that hash functions are usually imperfect. (Perfect hash functions exist, but tend to be very specific to particular applications and particular datasets; they're hardly ever worthwhile.) There are two approaches to dealing with this, and each requires storing the key with the value: one (open addressing) is to use a pre-determined pattern to look onward from the location in the array with the hash for somewhere that is free, the other (chaining) is to store a linked list hanging off each entry in the array (so you do a linear lookup over what is hopefully a short list). The cases of production code where I've read the source code have all used chaining with dynamic rebuilding of the hash table when the load factor is excessive.
Good hash functions are one way functions that allow you to create a distributed value from any given input. Therefore, you will get somewhat unique values for each input value. They are also repeatable, such that any input will always generate the same output.
An example of a good hash function is SHA1 or SHA256.
Let's say that you have a database table of users. The columns are id, last_name, first_name, telephone_number, and address.
While any of these columns could have duplicates, let's assume that no rows are exactly the same.
In this case, id is simply a unique primary key of our making (a surrogate key). The id field doesn't actually contain any user data because we couldn't find a natural key that was unique for users, but we use the id field for building foreign key relationships with other tables.
We could look up the user record like this from our database:
SELECT * FROM users
WHERE last_name = 'Adams'
AND first_name = 'Marcus'
AND address = '1234 Main St'
AND telephone_number = '555-1212';
We have to search through 4 different columns, using 4 different indexes, to find my record.
However, you could create a new "hash" column, and store the hash value of all four columns combined.
String myHash = myHashFunction("Marcus" + "Adams" + "1234 Main St" + "555-1212");
You might get a hash value like AE32ABC31234CAD984EA8.
You store this hash value as a column in the database and index on that. You now only have to search one index.
SELECT * FROM users
WHERE hash_value = 'AE32ABC31234CAD984EA8';
Once we have the id for the requested user, we can use that value to look up related data in other tables.
The idea is that the hash function offloads work from the database server.
Collisions are not likely. If two users have the same hash, it's most likely that they have duplicate data.

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