To provide data analysis you may need to perform some basic trend analysis. For example, if you want to identify the percentage of change in the number of orders received from one month to the next. The challenge to providing that on the fly is the change can be either an increase or a decrease, […]
2007-03-02 (first published: 2007-01-25)
6,522 reads
For fellow Canadians and neighbours to the south, you may find useful a function to validate the formatting of a Canadian postal code. More than once I've had to work with web programmers on checking that a postal code meets the A1A1A1 style, so carry around a function that simply returns a true/false bit if […]
2007-01-15 (first published: 2007-01-05)
1,080 reads
There are many ways to format dates, and rather that reinvent the wheel each time I've found it helpful to have a user defined function always available. As a function it of courses processes on each row, and to enable the most flexibility the formatting style is passed simply as a parameter. Year month and […]
2005-08-31 (first published: 2005-08-25)
475 reads
Came across a great script from Ken Kaufman on copying backups using xp_cmdshell. Thought I'd contribute a script I wrote that builds on that to restore the latest production backup to a testing or development server. In this case I routinely create all my production backups to a network share and then use that source […]
2002-12-16
652 reads
By Brian Kelley
If you want to learn better, pause more in your learning to intentionally review.
By John
If you’ve used Azure SQL Managed Instance General Purpose, you know the drill: to...
By DataOnWheels
Ramblings of a retired data architect Let me start by saying that I have...
Not sure if this is really a relational theory question but it seems about...
Hi everyone, Below is a consolidated summary of what we validated Architecture & data...
Hi all, I recently moved to a new employer who have their HA setup...
I have this data in a SQL Server 2025 table:
CREATE TABLE Response ( ResponseID INT NOT NULL CONSTRAINT ResponsePK PRIMARY KEY , ResponseVal VARBINARY(5000) ) GOIf I want to get a value from this table that I can add to a URL in a browser, which of these code items produces a result I can use? See possible answers