I recently encountered a strange problem in Business Objects whilst trying to create a derived table against a MySQL database and whilst the query was a complex one it executed without fault in the MySQL Query Browser so I knew that wasn’t the probem. The error message I encountered was “SQLBindParameter not used for all parameters”…
I tried the same query as a Freehand SQL query in DeskI and received the same error, after banging my head against the problem for about 15 minutes I decided to take my favourite solution – I went for lunch! On return the solution seemed blindingly obvious, at the very top of my query I’d included a comment but in the comment I’d included a question mark – as soon as I removed the “?” the query ran without a hitch. I’m not quite sure of the reason behind this but I suspect that one of the Business Objects, ODBC or MySQL layers treats the “?” as a reserved character to indicate a parameterised query – if anyone has the answer i’d be interested to know.
SQL Server MVP Ken Simmons is offering the chance to win one of three MSDN subscriptions on his blog, I thought I’d join in by writing a post describing my favourite features of SQL Server.
The ‘big ticket’ item for me is SQL Server Integration Services. For those of you stumbling across this post from non-SQL backgrounds SSIS is Microsoft’s ETL tool and has been bundled with the database engine since SQL Server 2005. Essentially SSIS allows you to extract data from (or deliver data to) a range of ODBC, OLE DB, ADO.NET or flat file data sources including Oracle, DB2, MySQL, Excel, CSV files and of course – Microsoft SQL Server. Along the way you can make use of a range of tasks and components that allow you to transform the data and perform operations such as looping, FTP, Email, Lookup Values, Data Mining, Aggregation, Process Dimensions and many many more . There are alternatives out there but many are prohibitively expensive for the small-medium enterprise (e.g. Informatica, BODI) – that SSIS comes bundled with SQL Server still astonishes me to this day.
As for my favourite ‘little’ features I’d have include:
Linked Servers, a few people give it a bad rap since they can be misused but I’ve made great use of Linked Servers to simply data assurance processes and join data in queries running across both MySQL and Sybase data sources in a single statement.
Copy and Paste Coloured SQL, I’m not sure if it’s just because I’m used to Management Studio but I often struggle to read SQL if it’s not coloured-in. Colouring SQL improves readability and since SQL Server 2005 I’ve enjoyed the ability to copy and paste directly from Management Studio into emails or word documents and retain the coloured keywords, it makes documentation much more interesting.
Common Table Expressions, it took me a while to get into the swing of using CTEs and then for a while I probably over-used them before settling down. They’re often a great way to make statements with nested subqueries much more readable and much more elegant in design but whenever I go back to SQL Server 2000 or MySQL I really miss CTEs.
SQL Server Express, it might be a bit of a cheat to include an edition as a feature but the fact that the core SQL Server database engine is available for free is brilliant and allows a lot more people to try out SQL Server and see the difference between a slick GUI like Management Studio Express vs the MySQL toolset.
Intellisense, I couldn’t resist choosing this as one of the more modern features I love about SQL Server. Once you’ve gotten used to it Intellisense makes trotting out T-SQL statements a breeze and you know what? It just feels cool, albeit in a really geeky sense of the term.
This is just a quick tip to help people fix an odd error I encountered whilst runing a Freehand SQL query against a MySQL 5 database, I’d used prompted queries against MySQL previously so that wasn’t an issue – I’m speculating a little but in my case the data provider used subqueries and both the inner and outer query were prompted which is a little unusual.
The error I received was DA0005 “No column or data to fetch”…
The solution came from the brilliant BOB Forums (original post here), the solution was to edit the odbc.sbo file which on my default installation found in:
C:\Program Files\Business Objects\BusinessObjects Enterprise 11.5\win32_x86\dataAccess\connectionServer\odbc
You’ll need to add the following in the relevant section, in my case I added it under Generic, Generic ODBC and MySQL 5.
<Parameter Name="ForceSQLExecute">Always</Parameter>
After closing and restarting DeskI everything was fine, please bear in mind that if you’re running a client/server installation and your Inforview users need to run the report you’ll need to change the settings on the server too.
From July 16th – 18th 2010 in New York City the guys behind 2600 Magazine will be hosting The Next Hope, a conference for hackers of all types: amateurs, hobbyists, professionals and the generally curious.
Topics are wide and vary from IPv6 to Phone Phreaking, Disaster Relief to Graphic Novels and Cooking to DNS Sec – here’s the full talk schedule announced Monday (see table with abstracts here)…
Friday 16th
| Time |
Tesla |
Lovelace |
Bell |
| 10:00 |
IPv6 Playground: New Hope Update
Joe Klein |
GPS – It’s Not the Satellites That Know Where You Are
The Cheshire Catalyst |
|
| 11:00 |
The State of Global Intelligence
Robert Steele |
Locational Privacy and Wholesale Surveillance via Photo Services
Ben Jackson |
Light, Color, and Perception
Jonathan Foote |
| 12:00 |
Wireless Security: Killing Livers, Making Enemies
Dragorn, RenderMan |
Content of the Future
Greg Newby, Michael S. Hart |
SHODAN for Penetration Testers
Michael ‘theprez98′ Schearer |
| 13:00 |
Keynote Address
Dan Kaminsky |
|
|
| 14:00 |
(2 hours) |
Digital: A Love Story
Christine Love, Jason Scott |
Examining Costs, Benefits, and Economics in Malware and Carding Markets
Dr. Thomas J. Holt |
| 15:00 |
Arse Elektronika: Sex, Tech, and the Future of Screw-It-Yourself
Johannes Grenzfurthner |
Botnet Resistant Coding: Protecting Your Users from Script Kiddies
Fabian Rothschild, Peter Greko |
Electronic Take Back
John McNabb |
| 16:00 |
Own Your Phone
TProphet |
Sita Sings the Blues: A Free Culture Success Story
Nina Paley |
Cooking for Geeks
Jeff Potter |
| 17:00 |
Keeping Your Job While Being a Hacker
Alex Muentz |
“Brilliants Exploits” – A Look at the Vancouver 2010 Olympics
Colin Keigher |
Design of a Wireless EMG
Konstantin Avdashchenko |
| 18:00 |
Tor and Internet Censorship
Jacob Appelbaum, Seth Schoen |
The OpenAMD Project
Aestetix, cpfr, Echo, Far McKon, Mitch Altman, Travis Goodspeed |
Lisp, The Oldest Language of the Future
Adam Tannir |
| 19:00 |
Extreme Lockpicking
Barry Wels, Han Fey |
Easy Hacks on Telephone Entry Systems
Davi Ottenheimer |
Buying Privacy in Digitized Cities
Eleanor Saitta |
| 20:00 |
Build Robots and See the World
Jonathan Foote |
Towards Open Libraries and Schools
Ellen Meier, Gillian ‘Gus’ Andrews, Jessamyn West |
Monkeysphere: Fixing Authentication on the Net
Daniel Kahn Gillmor, Jameson Rollins |
| 21:00 |
Hackerspaces Forever: A Panel
Hackerspaces.org |
Introduction to the Chip Scene: Low Bit Music and Visuals
Don Miller, Joey Mariano, Peter Swimm |
Risk Analysis for Dummies
Nick Leghorn |
| 22:00 |
(2 hours) |
Electronic Waste: What’s Here and What’s Next
Stephanie Alarcon |
Detecting and Defending Your Network from Malware Using Nepenthes
Marco Figueroa |
| 23:00 |
Get Lamp Screening and Discussion
Jason Scott |
Interaction with Sensors, Receivers, Haptics, and Augmented Reality (90 minutes)
Elle Mehrmand, Micha Cardenas / Azdel Slade, Pan, Ryan O’Horo, TradeMark G. |
Injecting Electromagnetic Pulses into Digital Devices
Paul F. Renda |
Saturday 17th
| Time |
Tesla |
Lovelace |
Bell |
| 10:00 |
How to Run an Open Source Hardware Company
Limor ‘Ladyada’ Fried, Phillip Torrone |
T+40: The Three Greatest Hacks of Apollo
Stephen Cass |
False Domain Name Billing and Other Scams
The Cheshire Catalyst |
| 11:00 |
Video Surveillance, Society, and Your Face
Joshua Marpet |
Behind the Padlock: HTTPS Ubiquitous and Fragile
Seth Schoen |
Hacking Out a Graphic Novel
Ed Piskor |
| 12:00 |
Grand Theft Lazlow – How Hacking is Both the Death and Future of Traditional and Interactive Publishing, Journalism, and the Media
Lazlow |
Vintage Computing
Bill Degnan, Evan Koblentz |
For Its Own Sake and to Build Something Better: A Primer on Neuroscience, Bat Echolocation, and Hacker Bio-inspiration
Scott Livingston |
| 13:00 |
Keynote Address
Julian Assange |
|
|
| 14:00 |
(2 hours) |
A Red Team Exercise
Tom Brennan |
No Free Lunch: Privacy Risks and Issues in Online Gaming
Don Tobin, Lyndsey Brown |
| 15:00 |
How to Bring Your Project from Idea to Reality: Make a Living Doing What You Love
Mitch Altman |
Geo-Tagging: Opting-In to Total Surveillance
Paul V |
Modern CrimeWare Tools and Techniques: An Analysis of Underground Resources
Alexander Heid |
| 16:00 |
Snatch Those Waves: Prometheus Radio and the Fight for Popular Communications
Maggie Avener, Pete Tridish |
Memory Fun 101 – Memory Training for Everyone
Chester Santos |
Surf’s Up! Exploring Cross Site Request Forgery (CSRF) through Social Network Exploitation
Daniel McCarney |
| 17:00 |
Privacy is Dead – Get Over It
Steven Rambam |
Smartphone Ownage: The State of Mobile Botnets and Rootkits
Jimmy Shah |
Much Ado About Randomness
Dr. Aleksandr Yampolskiy |
| 18:00 |
(3 hours) |
Free Software: Why We Need a Big Tent
Deb Nicholson |
Why You Should Be an Amateur
Ben Jackson |
| 19:00 |
(3 hours) |
Reach Out And Touch Face: A Rant About Failing
Johannes Grenzfurthner |
Hackers for Human Rights
Adrian Hong |
| 20:00 |
Rummaging in the Government’s Attic: Lessons Learned from More Than 1,000 Freedom of Information Act Requests
Michael Ravnitzky, Phil Lapsley |
Hey, Don’t Call That Guy A Noob: Toward a More Welcoming Hacker Community
Nicolle (‘Rogueclown’) Neulist |
The Telephone Pioneers of America
Kyle Drosdick |
| 21:00 |
Social Engineering
Emmanuel Goldstein |
Circuitbending
Jimmie Rodgers |
|
| 22:00 |
Building and Breaking the Next HOPE Badge
Travis Goodspeed |
2600 Meetings: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow
Gonzo, Grey Frequency, Rob T Firefly |
PSTN-based Cartography
Da Beave, JFalcon |
| 23:00 |
Net Wars Over Free Speech, Freedom, and Secrecy or How to Understand the Hacker and Lulz Battle Against the Church of Scientology
Finn Brunton, Gabriella Coleman |
Hacking Our Biochemistry: Pharmacy and the Hacker Perspective
Jennifer Ortiz |
Radio Reconnaissance in Penetration Testing – All Your RF Are Belong to Us
Matt Neely |
| 00:00 |
Saturday Night Hacker Cinema |
Spy Improv on Steroids – Steele Uncensored – Anything Goes
Robert Steele |
|
Sunday 18th
| Time |
Tesla |
Lovelace |
Bell |
| 10:00 |
The Need for a Computer Crime Innocence Project
Alex Muentz, Joe Cicero, Seth Schoen |
Hacking Your GPS
Cass Lewart |
Hacking Terrorist Networks Logically and Emotionally
Hat Trick, Mudsplatter |
| 11:00 |
From Indymedia to Demand Media: Participation, Surveillance, and the Transformation of Journalism
Chris Anderson |
Hacking for an Audience: Technology Backstage at Live Shows
John Huntington |
Lock Bypass without Lockpicks
Dan Crowley |
| 12:00 |
Cats and Mice: The Phone Company, the FBI, and the Phone Phreaks
Phil Lapsley |
Simpsons Already Did It – Where Do You Think the Name “Trojan” Came From Anyway?
Bill Cheswick, Matt Blaze, Sandy Clark (Mouse) |
Burning and Building Bridges: A Primer to Hacking the Education System
Christina ‘fabulous’ Pei |
| 13:00 |
The DMCA and ACTA vs. Academic and Professional Research: How Misuse of This Intellectual Property Legislation Chills Research, Disclosure, and Innovation
Chris Mooney, Tiffany Rad |
American Bombe: How the U.S. Shattered the Enigma Code
Shalom Silbermintz |
TrackMeNot: Injecting Reasonable Doubt in Everyone’s Queries
Vincent Toubiana |
| 14:00 |
Informants: Villains or Heroes? (90 minutes) |
Into the Black: DPRK Exploration
Michael Kemp |
The Freedom Box: How to Reclaim Privacy on the Web
James Vasile |
| 15:00 |
Hacking the Food Genome (15:30)
Gweeds |
CV Dazzle: Face Deception
Adam Harvey |
Bakeca.it DDoS – How Evil Forces Have Been Defeated
Alessio ‘mayhem’ Pennasilico |
| 16:00 |
|
Hackers without Borders: Disaster Relief and Technology
Dennison Williams, Elena, Smokey |
The Black Suit Plan Isn’t Working – Now What?
James Arlen |
| 17:00 |
The HOPE Network |
Sniper Forensics – Changing the Landscape of Modern Forensics and Incident Response
Chris Pogue |
|
| 18:00 |
Closing Ceremonies |
|
|
Having been raised on the good old fashioned ZX Spectrum and introduced to PCs via MS-DOS I have something of a nostalgic fascination with command line interfaces, there’s something beautifully simplistic about using a good command line – like you’re talking to the machine directly. I’m not just talking about using the pseudo DOS-shell that comes with NT or the ubiquitous Unix/Linux command line, it’s the more exotic examples that pique my interest which is why I’m quite excited about the new Google command line tool.
Essentially GoogleCL is a Python application that can be executed at the command-line to make calls to various Google APIs, it currently offers limited support for Blogger, Calendar, Contacts, Docs, Picasa and YouTube but I’m certain that Google will deliver more features in the future. In terms of security, there’s a one-time authentication process for each application whereby the command-line tool launches a page in your default web browser to grant access for the GoogleCL tool. To me, the most interesting examples that Google provide are those allowing content creation…
- google blogger post blogpost.txt
- google calendar add "Dinner party with George today at 6pm"
- google contacts add "J. Random Hacker, jrandom@example.com"
- google picasa create --title "Vermont Test" --tags Vermont vermont.jpg>
- google youtube post --category Education --devtags GoogleCL killer_robots.avi
There may not be many obvious ties to the world of Business Intelligence here as GoogleCL is still in its infancy but for now at least you could perhaps drive scheduling through Google Calendar, maintain distribution lists in Google Contacts or automatically upload reports to Google Docs. I’m quite sure the possibilities will expand over time though especially since some major Google products are currently not included (e.g. Search, Gmail) – I, for one, will be watching with great expectations.
Categories:
Google, The Cloud, Tools & Utilities Tags:
blogger, calendar, cloud, command line, docs, Google, GoogleCL, picasa, Python, youtube
If you’ve not heard the buzz already Google have released a Command Line tool called GoogleCL, you can install in in Windows by following Isaac Truett’s guide to”Setup GoogleCL on WinXP“ but if you’re using a Mac and you’d like to install it and have a play here’s a few simple instructions…
- Enable your Root login (instructions from Apple in KBHT1528).
- Log in as Administrator (bear in mind your normal user shouldn’t have Admin rights).
- Download and install Xcode.
- Download and install MacPorts.
- Open up Terminal.
- Edit your ‘paths’ file: sudo vi /etc/paths
- Add a new line (press ‘i’ then scroll to the bottom first): “
/opt/local/bin“.
- Save the file (press ESC, then type “wq!”).
- Close Terminal and re-open.
- Type:
sudo port install googlecl, and press Enter (this takes a while).
- Log off as the Administrator.
- Log back in as yourself and test (see examples).
Categories:
Google, The Cloud, Tools & Utilities Tags:
blogger, calendar, command line, Contacts, docs, Google, GoogleCL, picasa, youtube
