Matthew McGiffen

I started my career in IT as a developer with Visual Basic, C# and ASP working with SQL Server backends. For the last ten years though I’ve focused on the SQL Server side of things. Currently I’m working for a leading software vendor for the financial industry as a DBA, doing a mixture of development and data architecture. If I have a speciality it is in making things run faster.

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Goodbye, Microsoft

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A few years ago I took a new job at Microsoft, working as a...

The SUM of Nothing: #SQLNewBlogger

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I caught this interesting item over on Pinal Dave’s blog: Eleven Interview Questions that...

How to Move the SSMS Status Bar to the Top and Color-Code SQL Server Connections

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I use color-coded connections in SSMS to distinguish Production, Pre-Production, UAT, and Development. But...

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Today's AI

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Split Large Queries in Athena with a Simple Modulo Trick

By Rahul Gupta

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Finding Trailing Spaces

By Steve Jones - SSC Editor

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Question of the Day

Finding Trailing Spaces

I have some data in a SQL Server 2025 database. It looks like this for the dbo.Customer table: 

CustomerID CustomerName PreferredName
1          Steve        Steve               
2          Andy         Andy               
3          Brian        Brian               
4          Allan        Allan               
5          Devin        Devin               
6          Steve        Steve               
7          Sally        Sally
I want to detect which names have a single trailing space. The CustomerName is a varchar() and the PreferredName is a CHAR(). Does this query detect the problem rows? 
SELECT 
       CustomerID,
       CustomerName,
       PreferredName
FROM Customer
WHERE CustomerName <> RTRIM(CustomerName)
OR PreferredName <> RTRIM(PreferredName);

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