It is irritating, sometimes alarming, for the user to be confronted by the 'deadlock message' when a deadlock happens. It can be a tiresome business to prevent them from occurring in applications. Fortunately, the profiler can be used to help DBAs identify how deadlocking problems happen, and indicate the best way of minimising the likelihood of their reappearance.
2008-07-21
5,295 reads
While working on a project recently I was asked to develop a mechanism that would provide the dates for state and federal holidays in a given year. Since this project deals with all states and territories of the United States, the list had to be comprehensive and the client asked that this list be in the form of a SQL query calculated on-the-fly, rather than a static list.
2008-07-21
5,482 reads
Some time ago, I loaded a large set of data into one my tables. To speed up the load, I disabled the FOREIGN KEY and CHECK constraints on the table and then re-enabled them after the load was complete. I am now finding that some of the loaded data was referentially invalid. What happened?
2008-07-18
3,000 reads
This document assists Crystal Report designers with migrating to Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services using a step-by-step migration strategy.
2008-07-18
3,526 reads
This article is a brief overview of Service Broker's core features, which are available (in a somewhat limited capacity) in SQL Server 2005 Express Edition. The next installment will describe a sample application illustrating its operations and discuss its management, security, and routing characteristics.
2008-07-17
2,448 reads
Histograms help people analyze large amounts of data, whether you display them as tables or as charts. This article shows you how to do both.
2008-07-16
3,216 reads
One thing you may need to do is dynamically return a set amount of rows based on user input. This could be for a search function, reports, dropdown lists or whatever. Instead of hard coding a set value you would like to pass in a variable that will then determine the number of rows to return. How can this be done with T-SQL?
2008-07-16
4,539 reads
When databases suddenly stop working, it can be for a number of different reasons. Human error plays a large part, of course, and the DBA needs to know what these various humans are up to. DDL triggers can help alert the DBA to unauthorized tampering with a production system, of course, but DDL triggers can't tell you everything. At some point, you will need to implement your own checks. Randy certainly reached that point!
2008-07-15
2,971 reads
Table locking hints provide developers much tighter control of their transactions. Look at the benefits and disadvantages of using the NOLOCK and READPAST table hints in SQL Server
2008-07-15
5,492 reads
I need to write a function to determine if particular year is a leap year (i.e. February contains 29 days rather than 28 days). I know that there are various rules for calculating leap years. Is there an easy way to figure this out? Can you provide an example or two to validate various years?
2008-07-14
5,755 reads
By Steve Jones
This was Redgate in 2010, spread across the globe. First the EU/US Here’s Asia...
By John
Today is Christmas and while I do not expect anybody to actual be reading...
By Bert Wagner
Until recently, my family's 90,000+ photos have been hidden away in the depths of...
Comments posted to this topic are about the item UNISTR Escape
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Celebrating Tomorrow
Comments posted to this topic are about the item SQL Art: I Made a...
In SQL Server 2025, I run this command:
SELECT UNISTR('*3041*308A*304C\3068 and good night', '*') as "A Classic";
What is returned? (assume the database has an appropriate collation)
A: 
B: 
C: 
See possible answers