Andy Warren

I started my SQL journey here at SQLServerCentral as one of the founders, helping to build a place to share and learn that continues to thrive under the editorial guidance of my friend Steve Jones. I've done a lot of volunteer work over the years ranging from our local SQL group (oPASS, SQLOrlando) to serving on the Board of Directors of PASS to designing and building the framework of SQLSaturday (which has gone on to produce more than 1000 locally managed events since we started in 2007). These days I manage a DBA team, but over the years I've been a trainer, consultant, contractor, and DBA. I'm rarely present on social media, the best way to contact me is here, LinkedIn, or via email.

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Technical Article

Sparse Columns – ConvertSVtoXML & XMLToResv

Not very often I run across something with zero matches in a search engine, but had it happen recently. I had set up a simple demo of a sparse column set and happened to look at the execution plan, was interested to see that the Compute Scalar was backed by ConvertSVtoXML. This was on a select from a table with one row, and then, being a little more curious, updated it with an xml fragment I saw a call to ConvertXMLtoResv. I’d venture that those serve to convert back/forth from XML storage.

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2009-10-15

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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;

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