When creating indexes on tables, it is always best to choose columns that have a high degree of selectivity, or uniqueness. This SP, ShowUniqueness, gives the user an easy way to determine the "uniqueness" percentage of a given column or combination of columns.
2002-10-23
467 reads
My stored procedure, sp_dbsettings, allows you to view, in a cross-tabular format, all the common options and their values for all the databases on your server. Optionally, you can pass a database name as an argument if you just want to view the settings for one database (i.e., EXEC sp_dbsettings 'Northwind'). Otherwise it shows info […]
2002-10-09
647 reads
T-SQL's CHARINDEX() function is a useful for parsing out characters within a string. However, it only returns the first occurrence of a character. Oftentimes one needs to locate the Nth instance of a character or a space, which can be a complicated task in standard T-SQL. This function I wrote, imaginatively named CHARINDEX2(), allows one […]
2002-09-27
32,412 reads
The sp_for procedure provides simple single-statement loop processing for T-SQL statements, similar to the FOR command in the C language or the DOS command-line utility by the same name.It's syntax is similar to that of the DOS command. It takes an argument to represent a variable, initialize the variable, set an increment, set an end […]
2002-09-13
905 reads
SQL Server's COUNT() function is a slow and expensive way to count a table's rows because it scans the entire table or index. FASTCOUNT(), which I created, is much more efficient for this purpose - its only drawback being that it may return inaccurate results if a nonlogged (e.g., bulk) data modification operation was recently […]
2002-09-10
856 reads
Let's say you have 2 tables: a Contacts table and a PhoneNumbers table (which stores all the phone numbers for each contact). You are asked to write a query that returns each contact's name and a comma-delimited string of phone numbers for each contact, something like this:FirstName LastName PhoneNumbers--------- -------- --------------------------John […]
2002-07-22
1,033 reads
Say you wanted to create an SP for updating records in a database. How would you do this in such a way as to allow your users to edit only a subset of fields in the record, without overwriting the other fields, and without requiring verbose IF blocks and CASE statements in your code?Simple. Use […]
2002-04-16
209 reads
This short and simple script is a very fast way to count the rows in all your indexed tables. I ran it against a 2-gigabyte database containing large tables (some with over a million rows!), and it returned results in under a second.
2002-03-12
2,882 reads
By Steve Jones
I had an idea for an animated view of a sales tool, and started...
Next Monday, February 9, 2026, my one-day live online training SQL Server Query Tuning...
By Steve Jones
One of the features we advocates have been advocating for is a better way...
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Level 28: DAX Text Functions:...
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On SQL Server 2025, what happens when I run this code:
SELECT JSON_OBJECTAGG( 'City':'Denver') GOSee possible answers