http://www.sqlservercentral.com/Content tagged T-SQL, Advanced Querying posted on SQLServerCentral.comen-us360sjones@sqlservercentral.com (Steve Jones)A Sudoku solution with set based T-SQL approach utilizing binary values and operators, to ease the algorithm.http://www.sqlservercentral.com/scripts/T-SQL/62978/2008/04/30http://www.sqlservercentral.com/scripts/T-SQL/62978/One of the very common questions posted about T-SQL is how to traverse a hierarchy in a set based manner. New author Craig Hatley brings us his techniques for handling the common scenario of employees and managers. http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Advanced+Querying/3001/2007/06/04http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Advanced+Querying/3001/In an interesting exercise in data conversion, Stephen Lasham brings us a nice article on basic manipulations. http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Advanced+Querying/2969/2008/04/25http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Advanced+Querying/2969/Tool to automatically query combinations of columns in your table to determine candidate for unique key.http://www.sqlservercentral.com/scripts/T-SQL/62086/2008/04/16http://www.sqlservercentral.com/scripts/T-SQL/62086/Part I of this series illustrated how to use simple case functions in queries. This installment discusses how to use case functions in different types of scenarios.http://www.sqlservercentral.com/redirect/articles/2952/2008/04/04http://www.sqlservercentral.com/redirect/articles/2952/Working with NULL functions can be tricky in T-SQL and SQL Server 2000. If you add in aggregates, you need to be sure you understand what the behavior will be or you might report incorrect values to a user. Michael Coles has written a new article that talks about how NULL affects your results. http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Advanced+Querying/gotchasqlaggregatefunctionsandnull/1947/2008/04/04http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Advanced+Querying/gotchasqlaggregatefunctionsandnull/1947/In SQL Server 2000 or any relational database, the concept of NULL can be both confusing and hazardess to your employment. Not understanding how to work with NULLs can lead to incorrect responses to queries and poor business decisions being made. New author Michael Coles brings us four rules that can help you work with NULL values in your tables. http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Advanced+Querying/fourrulesfornulls/1915/2008/03/28http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Advanced+Querying/fourrulesfornulls/1915/Truth tables are an important part of working with logical values in SQL Server. Yousef Ekhtiari brings us some T-SQL that can help you construct those many variable truth tables and ensure you are getting the results you expect. http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Advanced+Querying/2903/2008/03/07http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Advanced+Querying/2903/Have you ever wanted to ensure that keywords in your data are easily searchable? Have you struggled with full-text search? New author Michael Ahmadi brings us an interesting idea for a keyword tracking and searching subsystem based on T-SQL and triggers. http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Miscellaneous/2875/2008/02/21http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Miscellaneous/2875/An IP address is something we all recognize and is a piece of data that is quite prevalent in many systems. However it is a piece of data tha presents some challenges in its storage and retrieval. SQL Server guru David Poole presents us with a look at how you can work with this strange formatting. http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Advanced+Querying/2871/2008/02/19http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Advanced+Querying/2871/SQL Server 2000 and Transact-SQL have many features, but one of the most often asked for features has been the implementation of some sort of array data type. This basic programming concept is notably absent from the development platform and results in many headaches and frustrations for DBAs. New author Alex Grinberg brings us his techniques for simulating arrays in SQL Server 2000. http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Advanced+Querying/thearrayinsqlserver2000/1886/2008/02/15http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Advanced+Querying/thearrayinsqlserver2000/1886/Expanding on his series of string manipulation in T-SQL, Steve Jones takes a look at how you go about removing those unseen characters from your strings. http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Advanced+Querying/2843/2008/02/04http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Advanced+Querying/2843/There are many methods to do Running Totals and most are either slow to terribly slow or just unreliable. Here's the right way to do very high speed Running Totals. http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Advanced+Querying/61716/2008/01/31http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Advanced+Querying/61716/Dealing with NULL data is something that often confuses new SQL Server developers, but even experienced DBAs might not understand all the intricacies of NULL operations. In a follow up to his highly acclaimed Four Rules of Null article, Michael Coles brings us a few new tricks with NULLs. http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Advanced+Querying/2829/2008/01/25http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Advanced+Querying/2829/Most SQL Server DBAs have been taught that cursors are bad and should not be used. However there are some cases and places where they might be useful. SQL Server guru Andy Warren brings us an example of where they may be handy. http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Advanced+Querying/2785/2008/01/03http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Advanced+Querying/2785/Gregory Larsen discusses how to use the TOP clause to help solve requests where you want to restrict the number of records returned based on a record count.http://www.sqlservercentral.com/redirect/articles/2778/2007/12/27http://www.sqlservercentral.com/redirect/articles/2778/Just because it looks set based, doesn't mean it is. T-SQL Crackerjack Jeff Moden takes a look at a mistake that many query writers make.http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/T-SQL/61539/2007/12/06http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/T-SQL/61539/How often do you need to keep a total of all previous rows values when you run a query? This article shows you how you can achieve this.http://www.sqlservercentral.com/redirect/articles/2702/2007/11/23http://www.sqlservercentral.com/redirect/articles/2702/Dealing with NULL data is something that often confuses new SQL Server developers, but even experienced DBAs might not understand all the intricacies of NULL operations. In a follow up to his highly acclaimed Four Rules of Null article, Michael Coles brings us a few new tricks with NULLs. http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Advanced+Querying/2829/2008/01/25http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Advanced+Querying/2829/When reading rating information, how do you you knew how many points each separate voter gave if you only know the average rating and the number of votes? Well, you might be surprised to learn that you can figure it out using SQLhttp://www.sqlservercentral.com/redirect/articles/3241/2007/10/01http://www.sqlservercentral.com/redirect/articles/3241/T-SQL is a powerful language, enabling you to handle many different types of set based operations. But having flexible WHERE clauses isn't something that many DBAs deal with on a daily basis. New Author Sotiris Filippidis brings us an article on how you can structure a WHERE clause to handle all types of strange business logic without using dynamic SQL. Read on to learn more about his technique. http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Advanced+Querying/conditionalstatementsinwhereclauses/1436/2007/09/28http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Advanced+Querying/conditionalstatementsinwhereclauses/1436/When a function is wrapped around an indexed column in the WHERE clause it will usually prevent the proper usage of that index. This article gives an example and discusses what other options are available.http://www.sqlservercentral.com/redirect/articles/3251/2007/09/27http://www.sqlservercentral.com/redirect/articles/3251/Datetime data in SQL Server can be a little confusing to work with, especially as many front end languages do not combine the date and time into a single datatype. As a result, T-SQL is sometimes used to manipulate and convert datetime data into more useable formats. Author Leo Peysakhovich has written about some tricks that he uses to reformat and work with datetime data. http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Advanced+Querying/workingwithdatetime/1634/2007/09/21http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Advanced+Querying/workingwithdatetime/1634/We have a first look at one of the features in SQL Server 2008 that was cut from SQL Server 2005, but which has been highly anticipated. How many times have you written an "insert new, update match" routine? Jacob Sebastion shows us easy this becomes with the new MERGE keyword in SQL Server 2008. http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Advanced+Querying/3122/2007/09/11http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Advanced+Querying/3122/How many times have you wished that there was a parameter for DATEPART to allow you to check for workdays? While many of us may get stuck working 6 or 7 days a week, most of the world revolves on a 5 day work week. Monday through Friday. New author Jeff Moden brings us a method of easily calculating the number of workdays between any two dates. http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Advanced+Querying/calculatingworkdays/1660/2007/09/07http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Advanced+Querying/calculatingworkdays/1660/One of the more common requests of an application working with SQL Server is to deal with pages, or sections, or data rather than an entire result set. Often an application retreives the entire result set and then only shows the user a few records, repeating the process with the next page. Regular columnist Jacob Sebastian brings us a more efficient method of implementing paging in SQL Server 2005. http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Advanced+Querying/3181/2007/08/29http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Advanced+Querying/3181/One common need that DBAs run into is building a report that returns data in some random order. Especially if you're doing some type of contest, like giving something away at your User Group meeting. Andy Warren brings us a short article on this with a look at the performance impact of randomly ordering results. http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Advanced+Querying/3175/2007/08/23http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Advanced+Querying/3175/Describes how you can link SQL Server with many different data sources like a directory as Active Directory Application Mode, a Microsoft Indexing Server catalog, a Microsoft Access database and a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet. Also explains how to query linked servers using the OPENQUERY command.http://www.sqlservercentral.com/redirect/articles/3171/2007/08/21http://www.sqlservercentral.com/redirect/articles/3171/Remi Gregoire describes one of the Support nightmares, the vice of RBAR Database Programming, 'Row By Agonising Row', and illustrates how the effect of RBAR can sometimes be felt only years after an application is released, when the database supporting the application grows. http://www.sqlservercentral.com/redirect/articles/3154/2007/08/16http://www.sqlservercentral.com/redirect/articles/3154/There is often a need to work with time data representing various events and then reporting on them in SQL Server applications. However T-SQL doesn't necessarily make this easy. However new author Joe Lynds brings us an article on some advanced T-SQL to do just that. http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Advanced+Querying/3136/2007/08/15http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Advanced+Querying/3136/