The Conficker/Downadup worm managed to slither onto millions of PCs worldwide at its height, but after it initially infected a computer it only really acted to spread itself, and didn’t cause further harm. Until now.

Symantec reports today that it has found a new variant of the virulent worm that will identify antivirus software or security analysis tools running on the infected PC, and attempt to shut down those programs. This is a strong signal that the worm’s mysterious creators haven’t abandoned their creation in the face of worldwide attention, as some in the industry have theorized, but may still have plans to make a buck off their work.

To protect against the Conficker worm, first make sure you’ve installed the patch that closes a targeted hole in the Microsoft Server Service. Next, protect any network shares and administrator accounts with a strong password, as Conficker will try to guess easy ones.

Finally, you can block the worm’s third infection, which hijacks thumb drives and other removeable media, by disabling Autorun on Windows. PC World has a download available that can automate that step for Windows XP users, and Microsoft has posted manual instructions.

Today I just got went though this, this helps you to execute a string in SQL. This is how you can execute a string in SQL,

Declare @query Varchar(500)

Set @query = ‘Select * From Employees’

Exec (@query)

OR

EXEC (‘USE AdventureWorks; SELECT EmployeeID, Title FROM HumanResources.Employee;’)

This way you can execute a string in SQL.

This is extremely helpful when you need to add the Where clause based on some criteria. You can have your query in a string and based on that criteria you can append the clause in that string and finally execute the string at the end. This works perfectly.

However this does not work if you want to execute the query and get the result in the Dataset in your .Net application. For that you need to create a #Temp table execute the string and get the result in the #Temp table and then fire the select again on your #Temp table.

Note: Don’t forget to get the brackets ( & ) around your query else SQL will throw an error, Unrecognized stored procedure.