Creating a Basic CLR Stored Procedure Using C# in Visual Studio 2010

I was recently confronted with a problem managing a database of MAC addresses. Our company purchased a block of MACs and our team was tasked with the problem of creating the database and associated services for managing the MAC range.

The problem was that there did not seem to be any way to easily convert from decimal integer types to hexadecimal in T-SQL. One possible way to solve this problem is to write a simple C# CLR stored procedure as this type of conversion is pretty trivial in languages like C#.

This tutorial assumes you will be adding the CLR stored procedure to the AdventureWorks 2008 database and that you will be using SQL Server 2008 R2.

Step 1 – Enabling CLR in SQL Server

Run sp_configure to enable CLR on your test SQL Server Instance.

EXEC sp_configure 'clr enabled', 1 GO RECONFIGURE GO

Refocusing on Studies and Blogging

It has been a crazy couple of months. I have actually gotten my dream as a SQL Server and SharePoint admin/developer. I cannot explain how happy this has made me and I have been working hard to fill in the gaps in my knowledge. Now that I'm more settled in, I'm trying to get back on track as far as my studies go and take the dang upgrade exam for the MCITP DBA 2008. I know I am pretty much ready for the test. I think with a good review of mirroring and replication I could pass without really doing any prep. So I am hoping to schedule this exam as soon as possible.

I use certification to both focus and measure my studies on a given topic. There are a couple of other areas that I need to explore and I am going to pursuing the following certifications in the next 6 months as well:

• MCITP: SharePoint 2010 Administrator (70-677 | 70-668)
  
• MCTS: SQL Server 2008, Business Intelligence Development (70-448)
  

I'm really hoping to be able to accomplish these quickly and be able to share some details about my studies and some of the very interesting things that I have going on at work.

The Power of Stupid...

Stupid mistakes can just make you feel like an idiot sometimes. At my new job I wasted nearly 2 hours trying to figure out why some very simple C# code was not working properly. The idea was to execute the code inside of an SSIS package so that it updates a WSS 3.0 Issue Tracker list. It was simple stuff, but it took me far too long to realize that I was logged in on the wrong domain.


It was not until I wrote the same code in PowerShell that I actually got an error that made sense: “Access Denied.” I mentioned this to my boss who asked me which domain I was logged in under. Then I typed whoami and quickly realized what a dummy I had been.

Chinook Database on CodePlex

The other day I was browsing around CodePlex and found a wonderful tool for learning SQL Server or for integrating your applications with SQL Server. The Chinook database, while small, has some cool appeal to it. It has all the major components you need. You can work on reporting for invoicing, sales, inventory, just about anything. You can download it at http://chinookdatabase.codeplex.com/