May Long Weekend Trip Photos

Niagara Falls

Water Closeup

Falls, a long shot

another look at falls

A small layer of falls

Photos of New Vrindavan (Iskon Temple, Wheeling, West Virginia)

Radha Krishna

Narasimha Swamy

Palace of Gold

Radha Krishna in decorated swing

Photo of Lalitha Puja at my Home

Rice Prices

Just wanted to add this current condition and update to all people who love rice. Although this post might be old for you this is what the prices are in our area for rice. 2 months back Sona masoori bag of rice (of 20 pounds) would cost us $8-$9. Later it went up to $10 for few days. As soon as the rice export stopped from India news flashed, they immediately raised the price on same day to $18. When we went to Indian store to get rice again, they said it is $26.

Currently we switched to Jasmine rice, which is little better in price ($20 for 25 pounds) no way comparision in taste or quality to Sona masoori. Want to get basmati rice atleast, but our local BJs do not have any basmati rice. I went like 4 times (weekedays and weekends) but no difference. I could not find one.

I was wondering when will this stop. Hopefully in an year when they are supposed to start the export again, the prices hopefully might come down. Keeping my fingers crossed.

INFA: Partition problem

I tried to use an aggregator transformation which has two aggregate functions inside. One is MIN and other is SUM of some fields...

When I tried to run it. It throws me an error of Partition License blah blah....

One of our very good folks in our team found a roundabout way for this. Remove the SortedInput option for the aggregator and use a sorter transformation before it. Recreate the session and it should work now.

Informatica Learning

I recently learned Informatica(INFA) and started having hands on experiance with it. I wanted to share some of my INFA experiances/issues/solution with all.

RTrim or LTrim takes a parameter which can be a specific string. If the string contains the specified one it trims(deletes) from the actual string given, else leaves it as it is.
For Example: I had a date pattern like '7/8/2006 0:00:00'. I used the RTrim expression as below:
RTRIM(In_str, '0:00:00')
The output of above is '7/8/2006'.

Will publish more as I come across.

Excel Files: Changing the Delimiter to | from ,

Yes, you can set a pipe rather than a comma as a delimiter. It does not depend completely on Excel. It depends on Windows. The quickest way is to save the file as a CSV file.

To change the default on your PC to a pipe rather than a comma bring up your default options window by clicking Start -> Settings -> Control Panel -> Regional Settings.

Click the "Number" tab and in the "List Separator" field, replace the current default separator with the one you want to use (let's say a pipe symbol | ).

Click "OK" to save the change and close the window. You can now save Excel files as pipe delimited files by simply doing the following in Excel:

Open or Create a new file in Excel.
Click File => Save As on the menu bar.
In the "File Type" drop down, select "CSV (comma separated values) *.csv".


You can find the original post for the above here.
http://webxadmin.free.fr/article/excel-export-to-text-file-with-chosen-delimi-127.php

SQL Date Functions

-- The following sets the first day of the week as Monday
SET DATEFIRST 1

-- Given a date
DECLARE @tDate datetime
SET @tDate = '10/1/2006'

-- Week number in a month for a specific date
SELECT (datepart(ww,@tDate)) + 1- datepart(ww,dateadd(dd,-datepart(dd,@tDate),@tDate)) nWeek

-- Week Number of the Year
SELECT DATEPART(WK, @Month)

-- First Day of the Month
SELECT DATEADD(mm, DATEDIFF(mm,0,@Month), 0)

Some links where you can find more sql date functions are as follows:

http://www.databasejournal.com/features/mssql/article.php/3076421

http://www.planet-source-code.com/vb/scripts/ShowCode.asp?txtCodeId=575&lngWId=5

NovickSql.com has many sql functions that can be useful in the daily life of a sql server developer

Analysis Server 2000 + Service Pack 4

Now a days I am working on the Analysis Server 2000. So I shall try to share some things of my experiance for following few days.

Analysis Server 2000 with service pack 4 has this following bug when you try to access it from Sql Query Analyzer.

Server: Msg 7358, Level 16, State 1, Line 1

Try the following links for that. What they recommend is to get a hot fix for it. and dont get that hotfix if the issue is not critical for you.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/901200

http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=907323&SD=tech

http://www.kbalertz.com/Feedback_901200.aspx

Good Luck.

Technical

SOME USEFUL WEB SITES

For nice articles,

http://www.eggheadcafe.com
http://aspnet.4guysfromrolla.com
TRANSFER BIG FILES

They have the TransferBigFiles.com ready in just a weekend. Check this article.. Cant believe it... but true.. Good Job from them.
YouSendit.com can also do it but the guys behind TransferBigFiles said it's not reliable and pretty limited functionality.

http://blogs.axosoft.com/hamids/archive/2005/06/07/1202.aspx

FREE XP THEMES

Wanna download some good themes for Windows XP Check out the following link. you can get many themes for free. I tried Windows Vista and Royale theme. Royale theme is good but Vista is kinda ok. but worth trying it once. Image

http://www.softpedia.com/catList/26,1,1,1.html

SQL F1

-- FOR LAST DAY OF MONTH
SET @CurrentPeriodEndDate = CONVERT( VARCHAR, Month(@EndDate)) + '/' + CONVERT( VARCHAR, @LastDay) + '/'+ CONVERT( VARCHAR, YEAR(@EndDate))

-- FOR START DAY OF MONTH
SET @CurrentPeriodBeginDate = DATEADD(mm, DATEDIFF(mm,0,@EndDate), 0)

--EXAMPLE FOR USING ORDER BY IN UNION STATEMENT
SELECT C.COMPID,C.COMPANYNAME
FROM (
SELECT COMPID, COMPANYNAME, 1 As OrderCol
FROM COMPANY WHERE CUSTID = 0
UNION ALL
SELECT COMPID, COMPANYNAME, 2
FROM COMPANY WHERE TYPE = 'New'
UNION ALL
SELECT COMPID, COMPANYNAME, 3
FROM COMPANY WHERE TYPE <> 'New'
) C
ORDER BY C.OrderCol,C.CompanyName

Daily Links

Technical : -

http://weblogs.asp.net/
http://shireesha.blogspot.com/
http://360.yahoo.com/shireesha1245
http://myindiancooking.blogspot.com

Deals : -

http://www.deals2buy.com/index.htm
http://www.edealinfo.com/
http://weblogs.asp.net