Don Frazier

Don Frazier is a Senior Programmer at EDS. He has over 20 years experience in the Information Systems industry on platforms ranging from IBM mainframes to PCs. His experience ranges from IBM Assembler Language to C/C++ to Visual Basic and the .NET languages of C# and VB.NET. Microsoft certifications include MCSE, MCSD and MCDBA. Don’s current assignment is leading the development effort for a large personnel system. This system is web based with SQL Server data bases. When not hard at work creating software, Don enjoys mowing his yard, flying his stunt kite and juggling.

Technical Article

zPad() - add leading zeros to a number

This user-defined function converts a number to character format and adds leading zeroes to pad the field to a specified length.  useful for displaying SSNs or other numeric fields where the leading 0's are significant but the field is stored as numeric.To use:select dbo.zPad(, )make sure your length includes an extra column for the sign.  […]

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2002-12-05

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Technical Article

Convert a number to words

This is a handy function that converts a  number (integer) into its word format.  This might be handy if you need to print a check formatted number in words.  Currently it supports an integer but it would be almost nothing to convert to support a bigint or decimal.The components are1) a table named PlaceValue that […]

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2002-12-04

327 reads

Technical Article

PACK() user defined function

Convert a decimal number to IBM EBCDIC packed decimal format.  If for some reason you need to export a number to IBM systems in native format, you can define a SQL Server field as binary(8) and Pack() your decimal number into it.  Then IBM mainframes and COBOL/CICS systems can read the numbers from your data […]

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2002-12-04

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The Long Running Backup

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Question of the Day

The Long Running Backup

I have a long running backup of the Sales database during a maintenance window that is going to take another 2 hours to complete on SQL Server 2022. I also need to perform some proactive work and add another file (ndf) to the Sales database to handle the expected growth of the next month. Can I do both simultaneously?

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