How to: Use Clustered Index and Non-Clustered Index on Columns in SQL Server

This article will explain how to or when to use clustered index and non-clustered index on columns in SQL Server database.

Indexes are used to change the order of the rows in the table (Clustered Indexes) or to add metadata that points to the rows in the table (Non-Clustered Indexes) for improving the performance of the queries on the table.

Clustered Indexes store the rows in the table in physically sorted order. Whereas, Non-Clustered Indexes store the pointers to the rows in the table. This helps in improving the performance of the queries on the table. ...

Introduction to Token Based Authentication

This is a short article that introduces the concept behind the Token Based Authentication being used in security architecture in modern applications.

Introduction

Traditional authentication mechanism required users to provide user name and password information to the web application or a web service, and on receipt of this information from the user, application would query a data store to retrieve the matching records for these passed information. Also, the user access level for the application resources would be determined by user role for the passed user name.

So, we have accepted this security process since past for our web application and it works perfectly fine. The only issue here is we need to provide our user name and password every time we want to access the resources from the application. Although, applications provide storing of user credentials in the cookie on the client machine, but this is not at all a secured way of storing credentials, especially when in case of financial or any other critical transactions. Here, using token based authentication would be the best form of user authentication security...

When Not to use Inheritance but Delegation

This is a small article which points out the misuse of Inheritance and when NOT to use Inheritance but to prefer using Delegation over Inheritance.

Introduction

Inheritance in object-oriented programming (OOP) is a relationship between classes in which sub-classes inherit attributes and behaviors of the pre-existing classes, which are referred to as Super-classes. This helps sub-classes in re-using existing behavior from super-classes.

Delegation in object-oriented programming (OOP) is a concept of delegating a task over to another part of the program, in which one object defers a task to another object in the system, known as Delegate.

When NOT to use Inheritance but Delegation

As we know that Inheritance is a good mechanism for re-using and extending the behavior of a class, but it should not seen as the only way to achieve this. It is not always right to use Inheritance to achieve re-usability and extensibility in architecture. Delegation provides an excellent alternative way for extending the behavior of a class or system. There are several situations when Delegation is more useful and flexible compared to Inheritance...

Optimize application performace by calculating FetchSize in ODP .Net

In this article, we are going to see how to optimize the data access performance of an application using Oracle database and ODP .Net, by calculating fetch size to control the number of rows fetched from the database in each database round-trip.

Introduction

Application performance can be highly optimized by reducing the number of database round-trips it takes to fetch the required rows.

OracleCommand object and OracleDataReader object in ODP .Net provides a way to control the number of rows fetched from the database in each database round-trip.

Controlling the database Fetch Size

ODP .Net provides the FetchSize property on OracleCommand object, which represents the total memory size in bytes allocated to cache the fetched data from the oracle database in each database round-trip.

Setting FetchSize property

The FetchSize property can either be set on OracleCommand object or on the OracleDataReader object.

For Example: If you already know the total memory size required to fetch the rows in each database round-trip, then you can set the FetchSize property on OracleCommand object in design time ...

User Defined Type support in Oracle ODP .Net 11g

This article explains how to use Oracle User Defined Types (UDT) and custom .net types in ODP .Net 11g, to call Oracle Stored Procedure with Input and Output parameters, from .Net environment.

I will explain how to use Orace UDT type with ODP .Net to accomplish this task. I have manually coded Custom UDT types as .Net classes using Generic template for Single types and Table types. These classes could have been created using automated tool that comes with ODP .Net 11g and it gets integrated with your VS IDE. You could easily auto-generate classes for your Oracle UDT types, with just a right click menu. But using Generic templates would make your classes clean and manageable, compared to the auto-generated messy code...

Previous versions of ODP.NET never had User Defined Type support for .Net. Therefore, to perform input/output operations in the Oracle stored procedures, we had to insert the array values into a temporary table and then use the values from this temporary for processing, a bit messy ...