I tried to install XAMPP on a Vista machine but I couln’t get the apache web server running. Port 80 was already used by another process. Since I have not installed the usual suspect Skype, I installed WAMP which comes with a port check tool that gives more detailed information than the one in XAMPP. And it told me the service using port 80 was microsoft-httpapi/2.0. After some googeling I learned that this is the SQL Server Reporting Services service from my SQL Server 2008 installation. To solve the problem do the following:
Open the SQL Server Configuration Manager
Double-click on SQL Server Reporting Services
Stop the service
On Tab Service changed the start mode to manual
Then port 80 is not used anymore and XAMPP and WAMP can be used without problems.
Just installed XAMPP lite on my Vista machine. The installation went smooth but the web server feels somehow slow. There is often a delay of about 1-2 seconds without any CPU load when I open a web page. I encountered this problem before on other Vista machines but never found a solution for it. Now I found a solution:
Open notepad.exe as administrator (right-click Notepad icon -> run as administrator)
Click on File -> Open
Change the selection Text files (*.txt) to All files (*.*)
Altough I have a lot of experience with SQL in general and the SQL Server in particular I decided to read Chapter 1 where they explain the SQL basics, to be sure to get it all. When I came to the part where they explained the GROUP BY clause, I stumbled across the following simple SQL statement (page 20):
SELECT Production.Product.ProductSubcategoryID
, AVG(ListPrice) AS 'Average'
, MIN(ListPrice) AS 'Minimum'
, MAX(ListPrice) AS 'Maximum'
FROM Production.Product
WHERE ListPrice <> 0
GROUP BY Product.ProductSubcategoryID;
The result set:
ProductSubcategoryID | Average | Minimum | Maximum
NULL 159.1333 133.34 196.92
1 1683.365 539.99 3399.99
2 1597.54 539.99 3578.27
...
What follows is this explanation of the result set:
The top row, where the ProductSubcategoryID is listed as NULL, is the summary row that provides the average, minimum and maxiumum list prices of products across all subcategories.
Aggregate functions with a simple GROUP BY do return a summary row? Could it be that I missed that all the years? Obviously the first row is simple the group of rows with ProductSubcategoryID of NULL and not a summary row. Or do I miss something here?
I know there is a WITH ROLLUP clause which produces summary rows, but this is explained in the next chapter of the book, so I don’t think it a simple typo.
Btw, this example uses the AdventureWorks2008 example database from Microsoft.
