John Sansom

John Sansom (Blog | Twitter) is a Microsoft Certified Master (MCM) of SQL Server and publisher of the free SQL community ebook DBA JumpStart, an inspiring collection of advice for Data Professionals, written by 20 SQL Server experts. Awarded the Microsoft Community Contributor(MCC) award, John is a prolific blogger and can be found regularly writing about SQL Server and Professional Development over at www.johnsansom.com.

All authors

All authors

Blogs

Goodbye, Microsoft

By

A few years ago I took a new job at Microsoft, working as a...

The SUM of Nothing: #SQLNewBlogger

By

I caught this interesting item over on Pinal Dave’s blog: Eleven Interview Questions that...

How to Move the SSMS Status Bar to the Top and Color-Code SQL Server Connections

By

I use color-coded connections in SSMS to distinguish Production, Pre-Production, UAT, and Development. But...

Read the latest Blogs

Forums

Today's AI

By Steve Jones - SSC Editor

Comments posted to this topic are about the item Today's AI

Split Large Queries in Athena with a Simple Modulo Trick

By Rahul Gupta

Comments posted to this topic are about the item Split Large Queries in Athena...

Finding Trailing Spaces

By Steve Jones - SSC Editor

Comments posted to this topic are about the item Finding Trailing Spaces

Visit the forum

Question of the Day

Finding Trailing Spaces

I have some data in a SQL Server 2025 database. It looks like this for the dbo.Customer table: 

CustomerID CustomerName PreferredName
1          Steve        Steve               
2          Andy         Andy               
3          Brian        Brian               
4          Allan        Allan               
5          Devin        Devin               
6          Steve        Steve               
7          Sally        Sally
I want to detect which names have a single trailing space. The CustomerName is a varchar() and the PreferredName is a CHAR(). Does this query detect the problem rows? 
SELECT 
       CustomerID,
       CustomerName,
       PreferredName
FROM Customer
WHERE CustomerName <> RTRIM(CustomerName)
OR PreferredName <> RTRIM(PreferredName);

See possible answers