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
32,400 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
1,032 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
2,881 reads
By Brian Kelley
If you want to learn better, pause more in your learning to intentionally review.
By John
If you’ve used Azure SQL Managed Instance General Purpose, you know the drill: to...
By DataOnWheels
Ramblings of a retired data architect Let me start by saying that I have...
Not sure if this is really a relational theory question but it seems about...
Hi everyone, Below is a consolidated summary of what we validated Architecture & data...
Hi all, I recently moved to a new employer who have their HA setup...
I have this data in a SQL Server 2025 table:
CREATE TABLE Response ( ResponseID INT NOT NULL CONSTRAINT ResponsePK PRIMARY KEY , ResponseVal VARBINARY(5000) ) GOIf I want to get a value from this table that I can add to a URL in a browser, which of these code items produces a result I can use? See possible answers