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)
6,546 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)
1,099 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)
482 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
662 reads
By James Serra
An architecture scenario Imagine separate Sales, Finance, Shared Data, and Executive Analytics workspaces. Sales...
Security on your SQL Server is important. That doesn’t need any explaining. But where...
It’s that time of year again! EightKB is back on August 20th at 13:00...
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Backing Up a DMK
Comments posted to this topic are about the item The Quiet Part
Comments posted to this topic are about the item BIT_COUNT in SQL Server
In SQL Server 2025, I have a database with a Database Masker Key (DMK). I want to back up this key and keep a copy offline. When do I have to open this key before running the backup?
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