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External Article

Row Sorting in SQL

It should be easy to model a game of poker in SQL. The problem is, however, that you need to model a permutation from a set of elements. Joe Celko argues that using a group of columns to do this isn't necessarily a violation of 1NF, since a permutation is atomic. Then comes the second problem: how would you sort such a column-base permutation in order? Sorting columns in SQL?

2013-01-04

4,573 reads

Technical Article

Querying SQL Server Agent Job History Data

Often times we are tasked with having to programmatically come with a list of durations per SQL Server Agent Job to trend the run times and order the results by date. Unfortunately it's not always easy in the way the data is stored in the system tables in the MSDB database. This tip explains how to use the system tables to get the data into the correct format for dates and job durations.

2013-01-02

3,890 reads

External Article

Free Tools for the DBA: PAL Tool

The Performance Analysis of Logs tool is a general tool for collecting and analysing log data. With the addition of a template, it becomes an effective way of analysing data from performance counters for SQL Server, in order to diagnose performance problems and capture baseline information.

2013-01-01

5,629 reads

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Question of the Day

BIT_COUNT I

In SQL Server 2025, I have a table (dbo.UserPermission) that contains this data:

UserID  UserPermissions
15
23
37
What is returned when I run this code:
select bit_count(UserPermissions) as PermissionCount
from dbo.UserPermission
where UserID = 3;

See possible answers