Andrew Poulter


Technical Article

User Defined Function for Padding Numbers

This scalar udf takes three parameters @Number INT, @Length INT, @Position CHAR(1) and returns a VARCHAR(50) string which pads @Number with zeros to the specified @Length either to the right or to the left, according to @Position ('L' or 'R').E.g. SELECT dbo.udf_PadNumber(5, 6, 'L') returns '000005' whereas SELECT dbo.udf_PadNumber(5, 6, 'R') returns '500000'. The function […]

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2006-03-13 (first published: )

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Technical Article

Last Day of Month

A script was recently published (Last_Date_Of_Month) that returns the last day of a given month/year combination. I have simplified and improved on that script by eliminating the need to use a WHILE loop. This new script exploits the flexibility of the DATEADD function which allows you to assign negative numbers (thus effectively subtracting a given […]

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2004-09-30

153 reads

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Question of the Day

Query Plan Regressions --

For the Question of the day, I am going to go deep, but try to be more clear, as I feel like I didn't give enough info last time, leading folks to guess the wrong answer... :) For today's question:  You’re troubleshooting a performance issue on a critical stored procedure. You notice that a previously efficient query now performs a full table scan instead of an index seek. Upon investigating, you find that an NVARCHAR parameter is being compared to a VARCHAR column in the WHERE clause. What is the most likely cause of the query plan regression?

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