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

316 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

12,051 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

616 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

9,208 reads

Blogs

The flight recorder: Replaying what an AI agent did on my SQL Server

By

“What exactly did it do on my server?” is the first question a DBA...

Announcements from the Microsoft Fabric Community Conference — Barcelona 2026

By

Microsoft shared a broad set of Fabric, Power BI, and SQL updates at FabCon...

Au Revoir for now

By

No, I’m not quitting or retiring. Just going on vacation, but I leave tonight...

Read the latest Blogs

Forums

Let's Talk Certifications

By Grant Fritchey

Comments posted to this topic are about the item Let's Talk Certifications, which is...

The Hidden Security Risks of Role Combination in SSAS Tabular

By Pablo Echeverria

Comments posted to this topic are about the item The Hidden Security Risks of...

The Empty Aggregate

By Steve Jones - SSC Editor

Comments posted to this topic are about the item The Empty Aggregate

Visit the forum

Question of the Day

The Empty Aggregate

I have this table in a SQL Server 2025 database:

CREATE TABLE [dbo].[CustomerOrder]
(
[OrderID] [int] NULL,
[CustomerID] [int] NULL,
[total] [money] NULL
) ON [PRIMARY]
GO
What is returned from this code? (answers are for the sum and then the count)
SELECT SUM(total) AS sum,
       COUNT(total) AS count
FROM dbo.CustomerOrder;



See possible answers