Returning rows in random order from MS SQL Server

Have you ever needed to return rows from MS SQL Server in random order every time you execute query? Here is simple solution to achieve this.

select top 10 * from some_table order by newid();

Sending emails from .NET to local folder

This is useful trick when you need to test email sending from your application without flooding your inbox.
It is enough to set up our mail settings in following way:

<configuration>
  <system.net>
    <mailSettings>
      <smtp deliveryMethod="SpecifiedPickupDirectory">
        <specifiedPickupDirectory pickupDirectoryLocation="Dir"/>
      </smtp>
     </mailSettings>
  </system.net>
</configuration>

Raven DB tutorials

Very nice series of tutorials about RavenDB by Piotr Kwapin.

• Part 1 - Introduction and Basic Operations
• Part 2 - Simple Querying

Definitely worth to see. Have a nice reading

Efficient dates processing in Autonomy Connectors

It happens that data for indexing are in poor shape. Majority of problems are different formats of the same piece of information. This time I will write shortly about dates processing and how to keep them consistent. I'm going to show ImportExtractDate command and it's parameters:

Unexpected crashes of Notes Connector

It happens that Notes Connector is crashing during processing of Lotus Notes database without any specific reason. What is even worst, it usually does not leave any clues in log files. It just exists without any additional information

In my case reason for that behavior were missing fields (on some of Notes documents I was indexing). I was trying to import such field, and perform on it certain operations. This second part was resulting in crash.

Metadata import from external sources in Autonomy connectors

My first entry will be about importing metadata from external sources when using Autonomy connectors for IDOL Server.

Sometimes, it is required to import additional metadata for indexed documents. In this article, I will describe import process based on Autonomy Lotus Notes Connector, but this procedure is applicable to other Autonomy connectors.

Let's begin....

Finally I have decided to start blog. I will be describing here all interesting problems ( and hopefully solutions ) which I'm fighting with during my day to day work. Let's see if this will work...