Miscellaneous

Technical Article

Random Number Generator

  • Script

Often the RAND() function is predictable based on the seed. This stored procedure generates a pretty good random integer because the seed itself is quite unpredictable. You can’t put this in a UDF since it is indeterminate due to the RAND and GETDATE() functions used.

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2006-09-15 (first published: )

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Technical Article

Career Paths for Programmers

  • Article

The key to maintaining a good employment outlook in IT, it seems, is to move out of programming and up into more business-oriented IT positions such as systems analyst, business analyst, project manager, or systems architect. However, a computer programmer can't just decide to become a systems analyst or project manager overnight.

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2006-08-29

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Technical Article

CHECKSUM replacement for TEXT

  • Script

As we all know, BINARY_CHECKSUM ignores columns of data type TEXT.This code is 100% compatible with MS original. That is, the result is identical.You can use it "as is", or you can use it to see that MS function does not produce that unique values one could expect.

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2007-02-13 (first published: )

213 reads

Technical Article

CHECKSUM replacement for IMAGE

  • Script

As we all know, BINARY_CHECKSUM ignores columns of data type IMAGE.This code is 100% compatible with MS original. That is, the result is identical.You can use it "as is", or you can use it to see that MS function does not produce that unique values one could expect.

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2007-02-15 (first published: )

232 reads

Technical Article

Split Function

  • Script

This is another type of split function which disects 8000 byte varchar with given delimeter and returns table with disected values.It does that with single select statement (internally looped), without using explicit while loop.Works pretty fast

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2007-02-06 (first published: )

426 reads

Technical Article

How Do I create an XML document from undefined legacy data?

  • Article

This article explains how to transform a nebulous application requirement like "take a flat file that was produced by an upstream mainframe application and produce an XML document for a downstream application," into a flexible working solution.

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2006-08-18

2,197 reads

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Using CHOOSE()

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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