There are certain circumstances where SQL Server will silently truncate data, without providing an error or warning, before it is inserted into a table. In this tip we cover some examples of when this occurs.  Read more...

Splitting strings based on patterns supported by LIKE and PATINDEX can be an interesting way to address a wide variety of problems.  Read more...

This article shows a clean non-looping method to parse comma separated values from a parameter passed to a stored procedure.  Read more...

This article from Todd Fifield shows a Way to avoid the dreaded LIKE operator in your queries and dramatically speed up keyword searches.  Read more...

This article will show some common integer data-type conversions using T-SQL.  Read more...

In general XML documents or fragments are held in strings as text markup. In SQL Server, XML variables and columns are instead tokenised to allow rapid access to the data within. This is fine, but can cause some odd problems, such as ' entitization'. What do you do if you need to preserve the formatting? As usual Rob Sheldon comes to our aid.   Read more...

It is recommended that you remove all special characters and HTML formatting. This task can be handled in TSQL code, however in this case I have the opportunity to use .NET and the power of the regular expressions to manage the string. In this tip, I'll build a CLR function which cleans up a string of HTML tags and special characters. I'll use Visual Studio 2010 with C# as the programming language. Check out this tip for my solution.  Read more...

When you are first learning PowerShell, it often seems to be an 'Alice through the looking-glass' world. Just the simple process of comparing and selecting strings can seem strangely obtuse. Michael turns the looking-glass into wonderland with his wall-chart of the PowerShell string-comparison operators and syntax  Read more...

Often in database design we store different values in rows to take advantage of a normalized design. However many times we need to combine multiple rows of data into one row for a report of some sort. New author Carl P. Anderson brings us some interesting T-SQL code to accomplish this.  Read more...

This article from Todd Fifield shows a Way to avoid the dreaded LIKE operator in your queries and dramatically speed up keyword searches.  Read more...

Fill in another bit of your T-SQL knowledge about STR(). It right justifies, rounds, and controls the output width of columns. Sounds perfect but here's why you might not want to use it.  Read more...

String searching and manipulation in SQL Server can be error-prone and tedious...unless you're armed with the techniques described in Robyn's string manipulation workbench, here newly revised with extra material from collaborator Phil Factor  Read more...

How to change your "UPPER" or "lower" case strings to a mixed case  Read more...

This article shows a clean non-looping method to parse comma separated values from a parameter passed to a stored procedure.  Read more...

In part II of his series, Stefan Krzywicki shos us another way Tally Tables have helped solve problems - Text Parsing.  Read more...

I see charindex used quite commonly in string manipulation.  What I rarely see used is the optional third parameter.  Here...  Read more...

No, I’m not talking about a Dickens novel. I’m talking about the number of characters in a string. I had a painful time recently because of the word “characters.”   Read more...

Often in database design we store different values in rows to take advantage of a normalized design. However many times we need to combine multiple rows of data into one row for a report of some sort. New author Carl P. Anderson brings us some interesting T-SQL code to accomplish this.  Read more...

I found something interesting the other day. I was attempting to optimize a very heavy string parsing routine using T-SQL and was having problems. I don’t normally use T-SQL for such heavy string parsing, but this was a special case of a legacy structure that I had to work with, so I had no choice.   Read more...

Learn how you can split a delimited string in a single query using XML with Divya Agrawal.  Read more...