To provide data analysis you may need to perform some basic trend analysis. For example, if you want to identify the percentage of change in the number of orders received from one month to the next. The challenge to providing that on the fly is the change can be either an increase or a decrease, […]
2007-03-02 (first published: 2007-01-25)
6,526 reads
For fellow Canadians and neighbours to the south, you may find useful a function to validate the formatting of a Canadian postal code. More than once I've had to work with web programmers on checking that a postal code meets the A1A1A1 style, so carry around a function that simply returns a true/false bit if […]
2007-01-15 (first published: 2007-01-05)
1,080 reads
There are many ways to format dates, and rather that reinvent the wheel each time I've found it helpful to have a user defined function always available. As a function it of courses processes on each row, and to enable the most flexibility the formatting style is passed simply as a parameter. Year month and […]
2005-08-31 (first published: 2005-08-25)
477 reads
Came across a great script from Ken Kaufman on copying backups using xp_cmdshell. Thought I'd contribute a script I wrote that builds on that to restore the latest production backup to a testing or development server. In this case I routinely create all my production backups to a network share and then use that source […]
2002-12-16
652 reads
By Steve Jones
For a number of years, we’ve produced the State of the Database Landscape report,...
By Steve Jones
I coach volleyball and I do a lot of stat stuff on paper. I...
By Steve Jones
dolorblindness – n. the frustration that you’ll never be able to understand another person’s...
Hi! I've been banging my head against the wall for 2 days now trying...
Comments posted to this topic are about the item The Power of Data and...
Comments posted to this topic are about the item What's the Date?
In SQL Server 2025, there is a new function that returns the current date without the time. What is it?
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