Be Careful with String Concatenations in SQL Server with Big Strings.

 Now, we are going to get slightly esoteric here. I'd noticed that the performance of string concatenation tasks didn't increase...

Inserting Markup into a String with SQL

 There are a number of occasions when one might want to insert information at various places in a string. Where...

The Wickedness of the mass 'REPLACE()'

  I have been admonished in the past for the use of this code which makes as many
substitutions as you like...

Sniffing out bogus data

/* Imagine that you have some names and addresses. You are anxious to look at the addresses that may be spurious....

SQL Server Messages: fairies rearranging furniture.

SQL Server and Sybase are geared up
to send information to applications over two distinct channels, the results in
one channel that...

Validating text data. A few techniques.

/*datafile used in the SQL  */

DECLARE @String VARCHAR(MAX)
SELECT  @String = 'When you are starting out to validate text input, perhaps to clean...

Rendering code nicely in blogs and forums.

 I wrote the prettifier specifically to help with posting SQL into blogs and forums. You can find it here http://extras.sqlservercentral.com/prettifier/prettifier.aspx...

Un-concatenating row values

/* Anith Sen's achievement, in his article 'Concatenating Row Values in Transact-SQL' has been to list and illustrate the many ways...

Never say 'never' to the WHILE loop.

/* download the test text file Moby-Dyck.zip here */
/* You might notice that I refer to Moby **** in this blog. This is because the busybodyish...