Technical Article

Calculating Percentage Change

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, […]

(1)

You rated this post out of 5. Change rating

2007-03-02 (first published: )

6,526 reads

Technical Article

Validating Canadian Postal Codes

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 […]

You rated this post out of 5. Change rating

2007-01-15 (first published: )

1,080 reads

Technical Article

Formatting Dates

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 […]

You rated this post out of 5. Change rating

2005-08-31 (first published: )

477 reads

Technical Article

Automatically Restoring from Production

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 […]

You rated this post out of 5. Change rating

2002-12-16

653 reads

Blogs

Git forked

By

Forgive me for the title. Mentally I’m 12. When I started my current day...

Setting FK Constraints in Data Modeler

By

One of the things a customer asked recently about Redgate Data Modeler was how...

Webinar: Navigating the Database Landscape in 2026

By

For a number of years, we’ve produced the State of the Database Landscape report,...

Read the latest Blogs

Forums

Expanding into Print

By Steve Jones - SSC Editor

Comments posted to this topic are about the item Expanding into Print

Downtime Caused by the Postgres Transaction ID Wraparound Problem

By Chandan Shukla

Comments posted to this topic are about the item Downtime Caused by the Postgres...

The String Distance I

By Steve Jones - SSC Editor

Comments posted to this topic are about the item The String Distance I

Visit the forum

Question of the Day

The String Distance I

In SQL Server 2025, what is returned by this code:

SELECT EDIT_DISTANCE('Steve', 'Stan')
Assume preview features are enabled.

See possible answers