Cade Bryant


Technical Article

Modified sp_who - more info & extra parameter

This procedure, sp_who3, is based on the system-supplied sp_who2, but is modified to return the actual text of the commands executed by each spid.  Very helpful for troubleshooting!  In addition, I have added a @hostname parameter to allow the user the option of viewing activity originating from only one computer, if desired.

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2004-05-06

657 reads

Technical Article

Parsing an IP address into its separate octets

IP addresses are represented as xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx, where xxx is an integer between 0 and 255.  Each three-digit integer is called an octet, and all IP addresses comprise four octets.Help-desk applications and administrative tools often store the IP addresses for a company's PCs in a database.  An IP address can be represented either as a single […]

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2004-02-25

2,355 reads

Technical Article

Execute VBScript commands or .vbs files via T-SQL.

sp_ExecVBScript allows you to execute either a .vbs file or an ad-hoc VBScript command within a T-SQL batch.  Note that the command (whether it be ad-hoc or contained in the .vbs file) cannot have any code that requires user input (such as Input Boxes or Message Boxes).

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2003-11-05

7,661 reads

Technical Article

Creating a Dynamic Crosstab Query

Crosstab queries (also called "pivot tables") in which you know beforehand the number of column values to aggregate by, can easily be performed in T-SQL using CASE statements wrapped in the SUM function.  Where things get tricky, however, is when you don't know how many aggregation values exist, and you are required to write a […]

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2003-09-26

3,715 reads

Technical Article

A faster way to count rows in a table

SQL Server includes the COUNT function for counting a table's rows - however, it can be slow.  Although querying the "rows" column from the sysindexes table is faster, it is not always accurate (e.g., if a bulk load process has recently taken place).  In addition, you would not be able to use this method in […]

(3)

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2003-09-11

412 reads

Technical Article

A more efficient ForEach routine

SQL 2000's sp_MSForEachDB and sp_MSForEachTable are useful procedures for performing operations against multiple objects; however, they aren't always extremely efficient, because internally they use cursors to do their work.These 2 sprocs, sp_ForEachDB and sp_ForEachTable, perform many of the same tasks as their Microsoft-shipped twins, but run faster because they dynamically build the SQL string without […]

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2003-08-19

2,279 reads

Technical Article

An alternative to self-joins

Oftentimes there is a need to retrieve different types of the same object (e.g. contacts).  For example, in a Contacts database, you might have a Contact table containing many different types of contacts (employees, customers, suppliers, etc).  Typically, a user might need to see a report of all different types of contacts for an order […]

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2003-07-18

836 reads

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Question of the Day

How Long is a Long I/O?

In SQL Server 2025, a long I/O is recorded in the error log with message 833. How long much an I/O request be outstanding before this message is written to the log?

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