sqlexpert

Interested in Haskell, Idris, Agda, F#, Scala, Clojure

Technical Article

LongestRunningQueries.vbs

This SQL 2005-only VBS script will show the longest-running queries on a given server, complete with graphical .sqlplan when clicked. Results go to a web page, viewed from the local machines's temp directory.Each row of the resulting table has the session ID, the currently running statement of the batch, a link to a text file […]

(1)

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2007-07-24 (first published: )

375 reads

Technical Article

faster dbo.ufn_vbintohexstr - varbinary to hex

Here's an alternative to Clinton Herring's ufn_vbintohexstr which should be much faster with large varbinary values. First, in his original version, the inner-loop CASE statements can be replaced with this: select @value = @value + CHAR(@vbin/16+48+(@vbin+96)/256*7) +CHAR(@vbin&15+48+((@vbin&15)+6)/16*7) How does it work? By adding 6 to a hex-digit in (@vbin&15), you have a value from 16 […]

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2006-12-20 (first published: )

130 reads

Technical Article

BASE64 Encode and Decode in T-SQL - optimized

This is just an optimized version of Daniel Payne's two scripts, base64_encode and base64_decode, with changes to end-of-block handling and a bug fix or two. If the encoded string ends in =, the last character is truncated. If ending in ==, two characters are chopped off. That seems better than replacing NUL characters with spaces, […]

(5)

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2006-12-18 (first published: )

7,694 reads

Technical Article

HexToInt

Challenged by Hans Lindgren's stored procedures of the same name, I created this. Note that it produces strange results on non-hexadecimal strings, overflows at 0x80000000, and could have issues with byte-ordering on some architectures.How does it work? Well, the distance between one after '9' (':') and 'A' is 7 in ASCII. Also, if I subtract […]

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2006-12-15 (first published: )

217 reads

Technical Article

HexToSmallInt

Hans asked if it could be faster. This is about 10% faster; not much. His is admittedly more readable, and mine will act very strangely with invalid hex digits.How does it work? I'm converting the string '1234' to the value 0x31323334 (for example), then subtracting '0000' so that it is 0-based in each byte (CONVERT(INT,0x30303030) […]

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2005-05-16 (first published: )

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Backup to Immutable Storage

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Microsoft Security Changes and SQL Server

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Question of the Day

Backup to Immutable Storage

In SQL Server 2025, a backup can be made on Azure Immutable Storage. What changes in how the backup is created?

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