The inclusion of the CLR in SQL Server has been controversial, but some people have come up with great ways to take advantage of this feature. New author Anders Pedersen brings us a technique to export data from SQL Server into Excel using the CLR.  Read more...

In part 2 of his series, Lee Everest expands upon bitmasking and integrates this with the SQL CLR.  Read more...

Learn how SQLCLR can be used to replace BCP and xp_cmdshell to export data to comma separated and tab delimited flat files.  Read more...

If a column is normalized, but the user really wants to see the values as a short comma separated list, how can I write a query that produces the list? Concatenating the values in a column would be pretty easy if SQL Server had a concatenate aggregate function, which it doesn't. What's more, for efficiency sake it's important to write the reporting queries without using cursors.  Read more...

Learn how to use SQLCLR to get file system information instead of using xp_cmdshell on your SQL Servers.  Read more...

I had been doing the validation with a T-SQL User Defined Function (UDF), but it was getting too slow as the number of e-mails grew. I needed a faster alternative, what options do I have?  Read more...

Reading files from the operating system can be done with T-SQL as I showed in the tip Using OPENROWSET to read large files into SQL Server. What if you want to write to an operating system file? For example, writing to a text file. There's no T-SQL that supports writing to a file.  Read more...

Build an application to extract a query's estimated execution cost from its XML showplan. Users can submit only those queries costing less than a predetermined threshold to a server running SQL Server 2005, thereby ensuring it is not overloaded with costly, long-running queries.  Read more...

Using the new SQLCLR feature, managed code can use ADO.NET when running inside SQL Server 2005. Learn about SQLCLR via basic scenarios of in-process data access, SQLCLR constructs, and their interactions.  Read more...

We occasionally come up with a requirement that would be a good fit for a CLR function or stored procedure. For instance we would like to call a stored procedure to get the list of files in a particular folder. How can we return the list of files as a standard result set (i.e. rows and columns) using the CLR?  Read more...

The CLR has not been well-received and most people use it for Regular Expressions and string functions. Here is an example that goes beyond trivial uses.  Read more...

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