AND !(oldvalue = null and newvalue = null)

The person who wrote the query was trying to exclude any records where both the oldValue  and newValue data was null, but NULL does not equal NULL so when used in the criteria of a query, there won’t be any records returned.

I found a good conceptual explanation of this from a stackoverflow answer:

NULL means “no value” or “unknown value”, and thus any comparison with any actual valuemakes no sense.

The proper notation to test for nulls is “is null” or “is not null”. You can see this at work in this query:

select null = null tests
union
select null is null

The solution was to access CF’s underlying Java. The ColdFusion struct is based on the Java HashMap. An extension of this is the Java LinkedHashMap, which behaves much like (and can be access by CF in the same way) as a HashMap/CF Struct but it keeps an ordered list of the keys.

<cfset structA = structNew() />
<cfset structA.first = “first” />
<cfset structA.second = “second” />
<cfset structA.third = “third” />

structNew:<br>
<cfloop list=”#structKeyList(structA)#” index=”i”>
<cfoutput>#i#<br></cfoutput>
</cfloop>
<br>
<cfset structB = createObject(“java”, “java.util.LinkedHashMap”).init() />
<cfset structB.first = “first” />
<cfset structB.second = “second” />
<cfset structB.third = “third” />

LinkedHashMap:<br>
<cfloop list=”#structKeyList(structB)#” index=”i”>
<cfoutput>#i#<br></cfoutput>
</cfloop>

Above we’re creating the similar objects, one of which is a regular CF struct (Java HashMap) and the other a LinkedHasMap. Running this code returns the following:

structNew:
THIRD
SECOND
FIRST

LinkedHashMap:
FIRST
SECOND
THIRD

Hat tip to @raelehman for finding the solution.


select count(1) as foo from main where len(pers_stmt) < 100

When I ran the page, however, the CF service immediately stopped. There are no entries in the server or application logs, so I can’t figure out what about the request is crashing the server. I even tried wrapping the query in a try/catch and the server still crashed.
Does anyone have any ideas (besides ditching Access) about where I can find logs relating to this?

Step 1. Download the SSL Certificate manually
To do this, bring up the URL in Firefox (making sure you’re using https). Go to Tools > Page Info, and select Security. Click View Certificate, select the Details tab, and then click the Export button, and save the certificate to your hard drive.

Step 2. Locate your JRE
Now that you have the certificate on your machine you essentially need to show it to the JRE, and tell it “I can vouch for him”. Before doing this, you’ll need to find your JRE. This can vary depending on your CF version and Edition, so to find this information log into the CF Administrator and go to Server Settings > Settings Summary. You’ll find the JRE location under “Java Home”. I changed the JRE I was using, so my Java Home value is C:\Program Files\Java\jre1.6.0_13.

Step 3. Check your currently accepted certificate sources
To store these trusted certificate sources, the JRE uses something called a keystore, and to interact with the keystore, you’ll need to use the keytool. Open a command line console, and navigate bin directory of the Java Home value you found in the last step. This is where my experience differed from Mark’s. I’m currently on ColdFusion8, and while Mark’s keytool.exe is in the %JAVAHOME%\lib directory, mine was in %JAVAHOME%\bin. You can navigate to the your JRE bin and lib folders in Windows Explorer to see which one contains the keytool.exe.

Once in this directory, you’ll run keytool -list to see a list of the SSL sources that are currently trusted. You don’t have to do this, but it will tell you how many entries your keystore currently has, and knowing this number will make it easy to verify that your certificate gets imported successfully.

To break this down, what this does is keytool (run keytool.exe) -list (list the certificates in my keystore) -storepass changeit (the password for the keystore is changeit) -keystore ../lib/security/cacerts (this is where you can find the keystore, which is shorthand for cd C:\Program Files\Java\jre1.6.0_13\lib\security\cacerts)

This is roughly what will be returned:

Step 4. Import the new certificate
In the last step, we saw that there were 44 entries in my keystore. Now we’ll add the new certificate.

This is similar to the options to get keystore list. The difference is instead of using -list, we’re using -import, and we’ve added -alias DigiCert (telling the keytoolwhat to name the entry) -noprompt (telling the keytoolnot to bother confirming that we want to add this entry) -trustcacerts (telling the keystore you want to add this as a trusted certificate) and -file g:\mynewcert.crt (telling the keytool where the new certificate is).

Step 5. Verify the import
After running the last command, you’ll get a response saying “Certificate was added to keystore” so this is probably unnecessary, but in the interest of thoroughness, I like to run the command from Step 3 to make sure that the number of entries in my keystore has incremented.

I’ve truncated the response, but as you can see my keystore now contains 45 entries.

The final step is to restart each instance of CF that needs to access the webservice so that CF has access to the updated keystore.

I have been with the company for almost eight years now and still get excited about the things that we’re doing. We’re an energetic and passionate group and because the company is still small this is a great opportunity for someone to take on responsibility and quickly impact our users.  If this interests you, see the job description below.

When creating a new column, I have always put the max number of digits in parentheses after INTEGER.  For example, if I didn’t expect a particular field to ever be more than 9,999 (in value), I would create the column as INTEGER(4).  This is dead wrong, and according to my teacher quite a lot of people do this.  The number after INTEGER is actually the minimum number of characters that you want to show if you have  ZEROFILL turned on.

For example:

CREATE TABLE myintegers (theints INTEGER(4) ZEROFILL);

INSERT INTO myintegers VALUES (3),(333),(33333),(3333333);

SELECT theints FROM myintegers;

will return

In actuality, if you don’t ever plan on a column going above 4 digits long, you should use a small int datatype.  Not only is it more specific to what you want, but it results in only 2 bytes of storage space being allocated versus 8 for an INT.  On a high performance database, this can make a big difference.

Finally, while I’m on the subject, I thought I’d mention the UNSIGNED option.  Adding the UNSIGNED option tells the storage engine that there can be no negative numbers.  Because negative numbers are disallowed, your upper limit for the value of your column is twice the value minus 1 what it would be if you allowed negatives.  A lot of you my be saying ‘of course’, but that was one of those things I always wondered about and never bothered to look up.

The storage space and lower/upper limits for MySQL integer (lowercase) data can be found here.

In order to add CVS into ColdFusion builder, go to Help > Software Updates.  Sam had to add the Eclipse update site to his Software update sites, but the version that I installed (which I downloaded from the public beta site on 7/17/09) had the site already included.  In Sam’s experience, the CVS Client was under the Eclipse SDK category, while I had to go into the “Uncategorized” section.  Below is a screenshot of the trees that I opened.  I neglected to capture the actual CVS builds that I got–there were several to choose from–but I just chose the highest version number listed: 1.1.2.x

After selecting the updates, click Install, and agree to the terms of use.  CFB will ask to restart, and once it comes back up, if you previously used the same workspace for CVS in CFEclipse, CVS in CFBuilder will automatically attach itself to your projects.

The first thing I did when it opened was point it at my old CFEclipse workspace so that I wouldn’t have to import my projects. In order to do this CFEclipse must be closed. Go to File > Switch Workplace > Other and browse to your old workplace folder. CFB will have to restart itself, but it does so very quickly. After starting back up, the first thing I noticed was that the snippets were missing. Snippets and shortcuts are important to me, and I really didn’t want to have to create them all over again, so I dug around in my workspace metadata and found them.

By default, cfeclipse seems to store them all in [workspaceroot]\.metadata\.plugins\org.cfeclipse.cfml\snippets.  If you changed this folder in CFEclipse, all you have to do is (in CF Builder) go to Window > Preferences > ColdFusion > Snippets and update your snippet path. Since I’m moving away from CFE, I figured it would make more sense to not rely on a CFE folder to store my snippets, so I copied all the xml files from the default path above into [workspaceroot]\.metadata\snippets, closed the Snippets view, and opened it up again, and they all popped up.

1.  Go to Computer, right click and choose “Properties”

2.  Select the Device Manager

3.  Scroll down to Portable Devices, and find the device with the missing/bad drivers.  On the blog I found, the device was listed as an iPhone.  On my machine it was called a Digital Still Camera.  Right click on the device, and choose Update Driver Software.

4. On the next screen choose “Browse my computer for driver software”

5.  Browse to C:\Program Files\Common Files\Apple and select this folder.  After a minute or so of updating, all should be well.