Miscellaneous

Technical Article

Pad Number

  • Script

A simple UDF for padding out numbers with a specific character (eg: pad 3 to show as 003).Usefull when you can only sort as a text item or for formatting purposes.Script is similar to the SPACE() function but allow the padding character to be defined.Usage:dbo.padNumber('string to pad', padsize, padchar)eg:SELECT dbo.padNumber('53', 4, '0') as testNumReturns:testNum-------0053

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2003-07-25

239 reads

SQLServerCentral Article

Finding and Deleting Duplicate Data

  • Article

Bad data is almost a given, but true duplicate data can really cause you some headaches. How do you remove all the duplicates and still leave a 'keeper' record? If you think procedural code it's not too hard, but can you do a set based solution? Chris shows you show!

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2003-07-25

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Technical Article

Zip Code Radius Search

  • Script

Enter the starting zip code and the number of miles for a radius search and the SP will return all the zip codes within the number of miles specified.The data file can be found at http://www.census.gov/tiger/tms/gazetteer/zips.txtThe record layout van be found at http://www.census.gov/tiger/tms/gazetteer/zip90r.txt

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2003-07-24

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Technical Article

Generic paged data like MySQL LIMIT

  • Script

This works, however code is creating a live temp_1 table in the database instead of using a #temp_1 temporary table because is just would not work.The next idea I had was to use a unique table name per connection for temp_1, but I would really rather use temporary tables.I am hoping some SQL guru's can […]

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2003-07-22

164 reads

Technical Article

An alternative to self-joins

  • Script

Oftentimes there is a need to retrieve different types of the same object (e.g. contacts).  For example, in a Contacts database, you might have a Contact table containing many different types of contacts (employees, customers, suppliers, etc).  Typically, a user might need to see a report of all different types of contacts for an order […]

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2003-07-18

886 reads

Technical Article

Check if someone use a database or not

  • Script

I manage quite a few hundred databases across the company. Time to time I get a question if I can check wheather a database is beeing used or not, and if it is, by whom?There are probably a 1000 ways to do this, but I've created a script for creating a scheduled job that runs […]

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2003-07-15

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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