January 15th through the 19th there will be a PostgreSQL hands-on certification training course in Las Vegas, NV. The course material covers Installing, running and administering PostgreSQL. The course will also cover security, backup and recovery, managing storage, performance tuning, maintenance and monitoring among other things. Attendees are encouraged to take the certification exam after the 5 day course. For additional details, or to sign up call CertFirst at (630) 684-0355.

If you are considering embedding a relational database in your software application or mobile hardware products, join Lee Stigile, Sales Engineer for MySQL AB in a Webinar January 4th, 2007. The web presentation will begin at 10pm PST. Practical use examples will be covered on storage engines, hardware storage and some examples on how to use views to hide sensitive data. With MySQL OEM’s increasing market share and lower memory footprint, this is definitely a must hear conference for anyone working in embedded or mobile database applications.

To register go to: http://www.mysql.com/news-and-events/web-seminars/embedding-guide.php

According to a new report by Evans Data Corp, Microsoft’s SQL Server tops the chart in wireless applications at 30%. While MySQL Server ranks in second with 20% market share followed by Oracle. The report suggests that Oracle’s market share should increase over the next year. The report also found that 40% of wireless applications are location based services like GPS technology and Google Maps for example. The number one platform this year is cell phones at 47%, taking most of it’s market share from PDAs which have historically dominated the mobile applications market. With SQL Server CE and MySQL OEM under more development and exposure this year some exciting things are in store for the future of the mobile data market.

Today Oracle announced a world record TPC-H 10 Terabyte benchmark result for Oracle 10g R2. This is the fastest performance result for a non-clustered configuration. System was running HP-UX 11i on an HP Integrity Superdome server with 64 Dual-Core Intel Itanium2 1.6 GHz processors and Oracle Database 10g Release 2.

xp_dirtree
Get a list of folders under the named folder.
EXEC master..xp_dirtree 'F:\DATA'

xp_enum_oledb_providers
List all OLE DB providers available.
EXEC master..xp_enum_oledb_providers

sp_MSgetversion
To get the current MS SQL Server version.
EXEC master..sp_MSgetversion

xp_enumcodepages
List all code pages and character sets.
EXEC master..xp_enumcodepages

xp_enumerrorlogs
Returns a list of all error logs with their last change date.
EXEC master..xp_enumerrorlogs

xp_enumdsn
List all System DSNs and their descriptions.
EXEC master..xp_enumdsn

xp_readerrorlog
Returns the contents of the error log.
EXEC master..xp_readerrorlog

xp_fixeddrives
List all hard drives and available disk space in Mb.
EXEC master..xp_fixeddrives

xp_getnetname
Get host WINS name.
EXEC master..xp_getnetname

xp_enumgroups
Return a list of NT user groups and their description.
EXEC master..xp_enumgroups

xp_fileexist
Check to see if a file exists.
EXEC master..xp_fileexist 'F:\DATA\my.log'

xp_regdeletekey
Delete a registry key.
EXEC master..xp_regdeletekey
@rootkey='HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE',
@key='SOFTWARE\Microsoft'

xp_regdeletevalue
Delete a registry key value.
EXEC master..xp_regdeletevalue
@rootkey='HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE',
@key='SOFTWARE\Microsoft',
@value_name='MSSQL'

xp_regread
Read a registry key.
DECLARE @test varchar(20)
EXEC master..xp_regread @rootkey='HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE',
@key='SOFTWARE\Microsoft',
@value_name='MSSQL',
@value=@test 80
SELECT @test

xp_regwrite
Write a registry key.
EXEC master..xp_regwrite
@rootkey='HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE',
@key='SOFTWARE\Microsoft',
@value_name='MSSQL',
@type='REG_SZ',
@value='NEW'

To get your CD Key that you used to install SQL Server, check the following registry key using regedit:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Microsoft SQL Server\80\registration\CD_KEY

More often than not you may not have access to the local machine. Instead you can use xp_regread, this undocumented and not well known extended stored proceedure allows you to read contents from the Windows registry of the host. The syntax is:


EXECUTE xp_regread [@rootkey=]'rootkey',
[@key=]'key'
[, [@value_name=]'value_name']
[, [@value=]@value OUTPUT]


To view your CD Key run:


USE master
EXEC xp_regread 'HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE',
'SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Microsoft SQL Server\80\registration',
'CD_KEY'


The SQL will return your CD install Key as a string.