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)
6,513 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)
1,075 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)
471 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
650 reads
By SQLPals
Dry-run xp_delete_file Before Actually Deleting Files? xp_delete_file doesn’t really have a...
By Brian Kelley
In the United States, today is Thanksgiving. The intent behind the holiday is to...
SQL Server 2025 RTM is here, and if you’re running Docker on macOS, you...
Apologies if this is posted in the wrong forum, but I am trying to...
Hello all, I have a linked server created on an instance which only has...
Hi, I want to find all the tables name under a database where tables...
In Azure SQL Database and SQL Server 2025, if I run this, what is returned?
SELECT '[' + SUBSTRING('Steve Jones', 7) + ']' See possible answers