Ryan McMinn – co-founder of the Toronto-based development shops Unspace and M7 Database Services turned Sith Lord with The Empire’s Access Team – co-hosts the newest show on Microsoft’s Channel 9: The Access Show. Ryan hosts The Access Show with Clint Covington and in the first episode, he and Clint talk about Access Services, a part of SharePoint 2010, which you can use to create new databases with forms and reports that run in the browser.

Ryan, on behalf of all of us at Microsoft Canada and the Toronto geek scene, I’d like to congratulate you on an excellent first episode and salute you with a left outer join on a flaming sword!

Go ahead – watch Ryan’s show now!

(At this point, you might be tempted to ask me “Hey, Joey: you seem like the sort of person who’d like to have his own show talking about Microsoft tools and tech. Why don’t you have one?” My response would be simply to say “Wait.”)

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

You’d think that with 10,000 years of date- and time-keeping under our belts, it would be easy to keep track of dates and times in a modern-day database. It’s a little trickier than you might think, according to The Death of DateTime?, an article in Bart Duncan’s SQL Weblog.

The gist of the article is pretty simple: if you’re using SQL Server 2008 and want to store dates and times unambiguously, use the datetimeoffset type (introduced in SQL Server 2008) rather than the traditional datetime.

Why? Because datetimeoffset is datetime with these key differences:

• The time value is stored internally in an unambiguous UTC format
• The local time zone offset is stored along with the UTC time
• It is capable of storing more precise times than datetime

Duncan recommends that if you’re storing data in SQL Server 2008, you should almost always store date-and-time values in datetimeoffset rather than datetime. It’s a good idea; I’d go even farther and suggest that if you’re programming using .NET 3.5, you should make use of the corresponding DateTimeOffset type instead of DateTime. You can read more about .NET 3.5’s DateTimeOffset type in this entry in Dan Rigsby’s blog titled DateTime vs. DateTimeOffset in .NET.

When might you want to use datetime? Duncan suggests that you should use it in those rare cases when you want to store time ambiguously. The example he provides is: “if you wanted a column to record the fact that all stores in a chain should open at 8:00am local time (whatever the local time zone may be), you should use datetime.”

Thanks to Brent Ozar for the link!

Maybe we’re seeing the start of a strange new manga trend in books. First came The Adventures of Johnny Bunko: The Last Career Guide You’ll Ever Need, and now there’s The Manga Guide to Databases:

Here’s the publisher’s write-up of the book:

Want to learn about databases without the tedium? With its unique combination of Japanese-style comics and serious educational content, The Manga Guide to Databases is just the book for you.

Princess Ruruna is stressed out. With the king and queen away, she has to manage the Kingdom of Kod’s humongous fruit-selling empire. Overseas departments, scads of inventory, conflicting prices, and so many customers! It’s all such a confusing mess. But a mysterious book and a helpful fairy promise to solve her organizational problems—with the practical magic of databases.

In The Manga Guide to Databases, Tico the fairy teaches the Princess how to simplify her data management. We follow along as they design a relational database, understand the entity-relationship model, perform basic database operations, and delve into more advanced topics. Once the Princess is familiar with transactions and basic SQL statements, she can keep her data timely and accurate for the entire kingdom. Finally, Tico explains ways to make the database more efficient and secure, and they discuss methods for concurrency and replication.

Examples and exercises (with answer keys) help you learn, and an appendix of frequently used SQL statements gives the tools you need to create and maintain full-featured databases.

(Of course, it wouldn’t be a royal kingdom without some drama, so read on to find out who gets the girl—the arrogant prince or the humble servant.)

This EduManga book is a translation of a bestselling series in Japan, co-published with Ohmsha, Ltd., of Tokyo, Japan.

The book will be available on December 1st, just in time to order as a Christmas present for someone who’s into both programming and manga.

In his latest article on Coding Horror, Jeff Atwood talks about the importance of getting your database under version control and links to K. Scott Allen’s series of articles on the topic:

1. Three rules for database work
2. The Baseline
3. Change Scripts
4. Views, Stored Procedures and the Like
5. Branching and Merging

Lucky me, I’ve got Rails migrations, which are suitable for small teams. Other development platforms will require different approaches, some of which are covered by Allen’s articles. If there’s a topic that’s screaming for a book or website, this is it!