David Poole

David Poole has been developing business applications since the days of the
Commodore Pet.

Those were the days when 8K was called RAM not KEYBOARD BUFFER.

He now works as Data Solutions Architect at Moneysupermarket
  • Interests: Badminton, Cycling and Music. Keen piano player.

Technical Article

To find the next available ID

There are times when you have a limited range of ids and these have to be re-used as they become available.The script lists the first missing id in a table.Note that this script works best for a table with a limited number of rows, say sub 100,000I tested this on a PIII 500MHz 256Mb RAM […]

You rated this post out of 5. Change rating

2002-12-09

268 reads

SQLServerCentral Article

Querying XML files using SQL 2000

One of the many useful features gained by SQL Server 2000 is the ability to handle XML documents. This means that any computer language capable of opening an XML files and calling SQL Server stored procedures can make use of this new ability. This article by David Poole shows you how!

(1)

You rated this post out of 5. Change rating

2002-10-11

12,021 reads

Technical Article

Function to return a delimited list as a table

This SQL2000 function accepts a delimited list of values as a string and the character you want to use as a delimiter.The function then splits these out and returns them as a table.The function assumes that the input string will contain unique integer values.Useage: -  SELECT Id FROM fnSplit('1,2,3,4' , ',')

You rated this post out of 5. Change rating

2002-06-27

585 reads

Technical Article

Loop through records without using a cursor

I sometimes have to loop through records in a database and perform a specific action on the value that is returned. For example, In the script below I loop through the user tables in sysobjects and simply print them out. This technique is useful when dropping all indices/triggers on a particular table, or adding WITH […]

(2)

You rated this post out of 5. Change rating

2001-11-25

9,187 reads

Blogs

The Book of Redgate: Spread across the world

By

This was Redgate in 2010, spread across the globe. First the EU/US Here’s Asia...

Merry Christmas

By

Today is Christmas and while I do not expect anybody to actual be reading...

Self-Hosting a Photo Server the Whole Family Can Use

By

Until recently, my family's 90,000+ photos have been hidden away in the depths of...

Read the latest Blogs

Forums

SQL Server 2025 Backup Compression Algorithm

By Johan Bijnens

Comments posted to this topic are about the item SQL Server 2025 Backup Compression...

The Large Encoded Value

By Steve Jones - SSC Editor

Comments posted to this topic are about the item The Large Encoded Value

The Side Job

By Steve Jones - SSC Editor

Comments posted to this topic are about the item The Side Job

Visit the forum

Question of the Day

The Large Encoded Value

I want to use the new BASE64_ENCODE() function in SQL Server 2025, but return a string that isn't large type. What is the longest varbinary string I can pass in and still get a varchar(8000) returned?

See possible answers