Keith Henry


Technical Article

Get contents of a directory/share to a table

Following on from todays QOD (on xp_cmdshell permissions) I thought this might be useful.Takes a directory or UNC path and returns the contents as a table.  eg:exec sp_getdir '\\mypc\c$'returns:datestring timestring directory   filesize    nameoffile---------- ---------- ----------- ----------- ----------------------18/07/2003 10:45      1           NULL        Documents and Settings18/07/2003 11:02    […]

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2003-09-04

266 reads

Technical Article

Convert float to duration-time string

This UDF is using in reporting where lots of durations are calculated, stored and then summed up and averaged for reports.  By storing the durations as floats (which are similar to the fixed point numbers datetimes are stored as) math functions are simpler.The problem is that float-times are not human readable, and cast(@floatime as datetime) […]

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2003-09-03

1,008 reads

Technical Article

Execute large sql (>8000 chars)

With a dynamic sql script under 4000 chars use sp_executesql With under 8000 chars write it to a variable.For anything longer you can use this script.  Use UpdateText and WriteText to write your dynamic sql to a text/ntext field in a table somewhere and then pass its location to this script.

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2003-09-01

604 reads

Technical Article

Prioritised list to table

I wrote this to allow me to send a priority list of int ids.This takes a "," seperated list of integers and puts them into a table, along with an [insorder] field that allows you to sort them.eg 2,6,3,1,7 becomesints insorder ---- --------1    72    13    56    37    9Depending on what […]

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2003-09-01

86 reads

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Question of the Day

Upgrading Admin Queries

I have a query from a former DBA that we run on SQL Server 2025 to check on database metadata. This query references sys.sysaltfiles. I want to refactor this code to be more modern. Which DMV should I reference instead?  

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