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SQL Prompt Safety Net Features for SSMS: SQL History

Mistakes occasionally happen. Occasionally, you make some ill-judged 'refinements' to working code and now just wish you could rewind your tab back in time an hour and forget the whole sorry episode. Now and again, SSMS just conspires against you and crashes unexpectedly, and you lose all your currently open query tabs, some of which you hadn't saved. SQL History offers a useful safety net in the event of any of these unfortunate events.

2023-04-17

External Article

Use DDL Triggers to Automatically Keep SQL Server Views in Sync

As much as we tell people to use SCHEMABINDING and avoid SELECT *, there is still a wide range of reasons people do not. A well-documented problem with SELECT * in views, specifically, is that the system caches the metadata about the view from the time the view was created, not when the view is queried. If the underlying table later changes, the view doesn't reflect the updated schema without refreshing, altering, or recreating the view. Wouldn't it be great if you could stop worrying about that scenario and have the system automatically keep the metadata in sync?

2023-04-17

External Article

Three Use Case Examples for SQL Subqueries

There are many great tutorials on syntax, performance, and keywords for invoking subqueries. However, I wish to discover a tip highlighting selected SQL subquery use cases. Please briefly describe three SQL subquery use case examples. For each use case, cover how a subquery interacts with outer queries and the T-SQL for implementing the use case. Review excerpts from each example to show the value of implementing the use case.

2023-04-14

External Article

How to ask for programming help

Over the past 25 years, I have answered a lot of programming questions in online forums, from co-workers, and from friends. It has been a while since I had been around forums, but I recently decided it was time to get back to what started me in the SQL community: answering questions. Not only is it complementary to my current job as Simple-Talk editor, it is really a great joy to be able to help other people with their problems. It is also educational to see the kinds of things other people are going through before you also go through them.

2023-04-12

External Article

Enhancing SSIS ETL Tools with SolarWinds Task Factory

SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) has been the de facto ETL tool for over 15 years for DBAs, Developers and Business Intelligence Professionals to extract, transform and load data (i.e. ETL tasks) for specific business processes, data-centric applications, data warehousing, reporting and data exchange between organizations. SSIS is a great product with high adoption across the globe, but has some limitations related to modern data sources, performance and streamlining tedious tasks. How can we overcome these limitations and have SSIS provide greater value?

2023-04-10

External Article

Why a monitoring tool is an essential tool for growing server estates

As we continue into the era of supporting more and more database platforms in our data estates, self-monitoring goes from being a very difficult task to a truly daunting task. I am personally advanced at diagnosing Microsoft SQL Server performance issues, but when that PostgreSQL server gets added, I just have to hope nothing goes wrong for a few years while I learn.

2023-04-10

External Article

Democratizing Self Service Cloud Analytics and ELT Supporting Modern Cloud Data Management Approaches

Many organizations struggle with democratizing access to data and analytics in the cloud, particularly for self-service purposes. As a result, data and analytics projects often require significant IT involvement, leading to delays, bottlenecks, and inefficiencies. Additionally, data analytics, ELT, and BI tools often require specialized technical expertise, making them inaccessible to a broader range of users. To address these challenges, organizations can adopt cloud-based data and analytics platforms that provide self-service capabilities and support modern cloud data management approaches.

2023-04-07

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Where Your Value Separates You from Others

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Fixing the Error

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Question of the Day

Fixing the Error

On SQL Server 2025, I have a database that has this collation: SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS. I decide I want to run this code: 

SELECT UNISTR('*3041*308A*304C*3068 and good night', '*') AS 'A Classic';
I get this error:Msg 9844, Level 16, State 4, Line 24 The char/varchar input type uses an unsupported collation. Only a UTF8 collation is supported with char/varchar input type in UNISTR function.What is the easiest way to fix this error?

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