Regular Columnist: Jacob Sebastian

This challenge involves writing a logic to identify incomplete segments and missing elements in an electronic data integration file exchanged between two applications.  Read more...

This challenge involves writing a logic to change the column position of values in the output based on the presence and absence of other values on each output row.  Read more...

This challenge involves extracting email addresses from a table that contains text data downloaded from various websites.  Read more...

This challenge involves converting numeric values from binary format to hexadecimal format.  Read more...

This article presents a generic function that makes it easy to query XML documents  Read more...

This article from MVP Jacob Sebastian looks at the modify method for changing an XML document.  Read more...

The cloud services from Microsoft for SQL Server are known as SQL Azure. MVP Jacob Sebastian brings us a introductory article about how to work with this service.  Read more...

Do you want to improve your T-SQL skills? MVP Jacob Sebastian runs regular challenges to get you to think about how to solve a problem in T-SQL. These run monthly and we have a summary and explanation from challenge #1 to help you learn more about moving data from 3 tables into a specific format.  Read more...

This next few installments of this series from MVP Jacob Sebastian will deal with how to modify XML documents. Part 1 looks at XQUERY.  Read more...

MVP Jacob Sebastian has written a great series on working with XML in SQL Server and we have the latest installment today. This time he presents a library of functions that can produce an RSS ATOM compliant feed of data.  Read more...

When information is exchanged in XML format, there needs to be an agreement between the sender and receiver about the structure and content of the XML document. An XSD (XML Schema Definition Language) Schema can be used to enforce this contract and validate the XML data being exchanged. Jacob Sebastian's book explains all.  Read more...

Continuing on with his series on SQL Server 2008, MVP Jacob Sebastian brings us a look at the debugger, which has returned in SQL Server 2008.  Read more...

RSS feeds are becoming almost required for any type of data publication. SQL Server MVP Jacob Sebastian brings us the next installment of his XML Workshop series that looks at a series of T-SQL functions to generate the RSS formatted data.  Read more...

SQL Server MVP Jacob Sebastian starts a new series looking at the changes in SQL Server 2008 to the management tools.  Read more...

This long running, and very popular, XML series continues with a look at building an ATOM feed with SQL Server.  Read more...

SQL Server MVP Jacob Sebastian continues his very successful XML series with a foray into SQL Server 2000's XML capabilities for generating custom documents.  Read more...

Continuing on with his amazing series on XML, SQL Server MVP Jacob Sebastian shows us how to use XML in SQL Server 2005 to generate an ATOM feed.  Read more...

Continuing on with part 18 of his series, MVP Jacob Sebastian examines building an RSS feed in T-SQL.  Read more...

Jacob Sebastian brings a little more complexity to working with XML documents. Here we learn how to iterate through a document and use each node and perform some action on each one.  Read more...

Continuing on with his series, Jacob Sebastian shows how you can shape the query results to a certain pre-defined XML structure in this article.  Read more...