Great article!

Here are a couple ways to check to make sure there is a mix of upper and lower case letters.

Use the LOWER function. This only ensures that there is at least one upper case character. Use like this:

if @password = LOWER (@password)

    -- Password has no upper-case characters

If you want to count how many of each character type, include this in your function/procedure (Assumes a string variable @password is passed in):

declare @lowerCount int

declare @upperCount int

declare @numberCount int

declare @specialCount int

declare @currentIndex int

declare @currentCharAscii int

set @currrentIndex = 0

while @currIndex < LEN (@password)

begin

    @currentCharAscii = ASCII (SUBSTRING (@password, @currentIndex, 1))

    if @currentCharAscii between 97 and 122 set @lowerCount = @lowerCount + 1

    if @currentCharAscii between 65 and 90 set @upperCount = @upperCount + 1

    if @currentCharAscii between 48 and 57 set @numberCount = @numberCount + 1

end

set @specialCount = LEN (@password) - @lowerCount - @upperCount - @numberCount

-- Check your rules

You might need to debug typing errors in the code snippet since I did not actually write it in QA (I don't have SQL Server tools on this computer) but the logic should be right.