Brix & The Extricated 30th May 2015

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Another enjoyable Brix gig this time at Hebden Bridge Trades Club.  Very similar to the previous gig at Leeds Brudenell but with the inclusion of Totally Wired.  Can’t fail really.  Good time had by all.   Hope there’s more dates forthcoming.

Below are some vids and photos I did  – Only did bits here and there – didn’t want to be one of those people who just film the whole gig with their hands in the air all evening.

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Implementing paging with the Twitter Search API

Useful article here runs through the paging mechanism available through the Twitter search API

https://dev.twitter.com/rest/public/timelines

Super Furry Animals return

All this new Super Furry Animals activity has reminded me of the time I saw them at the O2 festival in Leeds mid 2000s sometime I guess.  Great atmosphere in the tent and at the end it turned from a rock gig to a rave – Here’s some crappy footage I filmed

SSIS – Manually assigning Null values

Spent a few minutes trying to assign null to a derived variable as part of a script task transform. In my mind Row.CreatedDate = null would do it right?

After, making the changes and running the data through again I could see that this had no affect and all dates I thought I’d assigned null to had the DateTime.Min values.  Not what I wanted.

After doing a bit of digging online I chanced upon the following post 

As you can see all columns have their own Row.ColumnName_IsNull – Setting the relevant columns to True worked fine.

XML Refresher

Haven’t really touched XML for a fair few months now so by way of a refresher I worked through the excellent Pluralsight “Many Approaches To XML Processing” course. Notes below:-

Use XmlReader when reading LARGE documents from disk – does not read complete document. very fast – use when performance is an issue. You’d typically loop through each element reading (“ReadElementString”) into a stringbuilder.

XPath is more flexible – able to navigate and select nodes (“Similar to finding folders on a hard drive”) through XML.
Use XDocument (.Load) to read into memory complete XML document. You can use

XPath (XPathSelectElement(“/Employes/Employee”)

XPath (XPathSelectElements(“//Employes”) then foreach through each element or Linq to select nodes. Xml to Linq is easier to read than XPath

DataSet
Reads complete into memory – creates datatables
Read in XML document – loop through rows
Create a new DataSet then ReadXml on that object – Foreach through table’s rows. Can use search logic i.e ds.Tables[0].Select(“LastName LIKE ‘s%’);
ReadXmlSchema will validate xml against XSD.