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My last blog post was originally the start of this one, but I got so carried away talking about the different types of temp tables I split it off. Today's topic is when to create indexes on SQL temp tables-- before or after you add the data. Many people out there seem to hold the same opinion on the subject. I don't like taking other people's word and I also like doing things the hard way. Therefore I created a series of tests to see which way really was fastest.

Here's a quick note about SQL temp tables. In SQL Server, there are three kinds of temporary tables you can use. The first kind (my favorite) are known as table variables. They only exist in memory and are not written to disk (unless your OS is low on RAM and starts swapping). Table variable names start with an "@" just like other T-SQL variables and the syntax for one is like so:

Just a couple things I wanted to mention... The first is that the CFML Advisory Committee has been at work drafting their first version of the CFML language spec. Also, while looking through www.opencfml.org I noticed they are using CodexWiki which runs on ColdBox which is pretty cool. Speaking of ColdBox...

I've been following Sean Corfield's nice series, Railo for Dummies on installing Railo, Tomcat and Apache. (Does that make me a dummy?) His latest entry showed the simple steps he followed to convert his blog corfield.org over from Java 1.4 and CF7 to Java 1.6_13 and Railo 3.1.0.009.

Tonight I found myself needing to extract just the time from a datetime column in SQL Server 2000. After a bit of Googling, it became clear that there are about 1 million articles on how to extract just the date from a datetime, but not very many articles taking about just getting time. For reference, this is how I ended up doing it.

At work, we are building some content management utilities to keep track of our training materials and document all of our content in a database. To get a head start, our marketing team started a large Excel spreadsheet to list, categorize, label, and tag our hundreds and hundreds of resources. We decided to attempt to automatically import some of the content directly from Excel to keep them from having to hand-enter it again. Seeing as how we are wandering around in the cold, dark, stone ages of SQL Server 2000 I thought I would throw the .XLS file at a DTS package and see what happened.

This is a really cool feature of ColdFusion 8 that I had totally missed but I stumbled across an article on Ray Camden's blog today. (Thanks Ray!) Basically, you can modify your ColdFusion Administrator menus to include custom tools of your own choosing. Several pre-built ones out there including SpoolMail, a nifty util to re-copy your undeliverable mail back into the spool folder; and Cache Clearer, an easy way to clear out specific folders of trusted cache.

I have consistently been impressed by the number and quality of JQuery plugins that abound. Today at work we ran across JQuery Corners. This friggin' awesome plugin allows you to put rounded corners on your divs and it's oh, so easy.

I went to add a custom tag path onto my dev server this morning. Feeling a little lazy and not wanting to type in the full path by hand, I clicked the "Browse Server" button. There are similar buttons for adding ColdFusion mappings and searching for file-based databases while adding data sources. The Browse Server page uses an applet to let you choose directories or files off your server. I was greeted with an error message:
Server Error
IO error on server communication

This is a reminder of a great developer resource right here in our community. If you ever find yourself looking for a list of blog aggregators, hosting providers, job listings, code formatters, database tools, cf tools, editors, debuggers, time tracking apps or anything vaguely related to programming, you don't need to look much farther than