2007-08-23 (first published: 2007-02-06)
635 reads
Miscellaneous
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, […]
2007-03-02 (first published: 2007-01-25)
6,565 reads
What's a Good Manager
What makes a good manager? In response to a recent thread, Janet Wong takes us through some of the good and bad managers she's had during her career and talks about the problems today with technical managers.
2007-12-20 (first published: 2007-01-16)
12,922 reads
Canadian Postal Code validator
This is a slight improvement on the script posted the other day. Uses PATINDEX for pattern match, and checks for forbidden characters D, F, I, O, Q, U.
2007-08-14 (first published: 2007-01-15)
1,019 reads
Document Your Database
Computer professionals are constantly complaining about the documentation for the software they use. And are notorious for not documenting their own code very well. Longtime author Raj Vasant brings us a short article with some suggestions on how to go about documenting your databases.
2008-01-02 (first published: 2007-01-11)
13,851 reads
Generating Surrogate-Keys for Type 1 and Type 2 dimensions using SSIS
We published a very interesting article about data warehousing in the SQL Server Standard awhile back. However the article was abridged and the author, a very respected data warehousing professional asked that we publish the entire thing here. So we bring you Harsh Bhaiya's very popular ETL treatise.
2007-01-10
13,397 reads
SQL Server Availability Monitoring
This VB script will attempt to make a connection to all SQL Servers enumerated in the SQLInventory table over Named Pipes and TCP\IP. If a SQL Instance is listed, it will attempt TCP\IP connections using both port and instance name. Once the connection is established to each server using each protocol, the script will query […]
2007-01-11 (first published: 2007-01-05)
1,259 reads
Search All Columns in all tables
This script will quickly generate DML to search all the tables in the current database for a given string. It could be modified to execute the generated code if desired. If you are running this in a
2007-01-23 (first published: 2007-01-04)
3,006 reads
SQL Server 2005 Upgrade Analysis Report Stylesheet
XSLT Stylesheet to produce developer/object oriented html report from SQL Server 2005 Upgrade Advisor xml report file. Name the script sqlupad.xsl and insert the following as the first line in the xml Upgrade Advisor report file. Place sqlupad.xsl file in same directory as the xml report. This stylesheet works against Database Server component reportonly, does […]
2007-01-17 (first published: 2007-01-03)
208 reads
Processing event logs using DumpEvt and SQL Server
As a DBA, you can find very useful information in the Windows event logs. About important events, the health of your SQL Server and the operating system it runs on. Unfortunately, the logs also contain a lot of useless information. Some applications have a tendency to log hundreds of events every day, filling up the logs very quickly with info that you, as a DBA, do not need. But you still need to see that important message that informs you the server is going to crash if you don’t take action.
2006-12-28
2,298 reads
Blogs
T-SQL Tuesday #203: Risk and Reward
By Steve Jones
This is timely, as I’m currently on a boat in the Adriatic taking a...
dataMinds Connect 2026 – Slides & Scripts
You can find the slides and SQL scripts for my session “Spice up your...
How to Clear the SSMS Cache (SSMS 21 and Later)
By SQLPals
How to Clear the SSMS Cache (SSMS 21 and Later) Updated...
Forums
Using CHOOSE()
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Using CHOOSE()
Re-Seeding a Broken Log Shipping Secondary (Without Touching the Primary)
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Re-Seeding a Broken Log Shipping...
The DBA is Dead! Long Live the !
Comments posted to this topic are about the item The DBA is Dead! Long...
Question of the Day
Using CHOOSE()
We have this code that sets some status values and then queries them using the CHOOSE() function in SQL Server 2025.
CREATE TABLE Status
(
StatusID INT,
StatusDescription VARCHAR(20)
);
GO
INSERT dbo.Status
(
StatusID,
StatusDescription
)
VALUES
(0, 'Uncategorized'),
(1, 'Active'),
(2, 'Inactive'),
(3, 'Temp');
GO
SELECT CHOOSE(StatusID, 'Unknown', 'Active', 'Inactive', 'Temporary')
FROM Status;
When the SELECT runs, what is returned? See possible answers