drew.allen (1/4/2017)

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CASE is clearly more flexible than COALESCE, because it can perform any conditional test whereas COALESCE only tests whether an expression is NULL, and because it can return any...

Not at all off topic. You made some very good points. As did Luis about using the functions.

Thank you both...

As I said, these...

Just to clarify. The data is coming from a vendor-created database. I cannot make changes to it. I can, however, send emails to the users saying "Fix this item, it...

Eric M Russell (1/4/2017)

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As a side note, it would be great if all valid codes could be pre-loaded into a primary keyed master table, then data validation could be enforced...

Luis Cazares (1/4/2017)

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Does this works?

IF (SELECT OBJECT_ID('tempdb..#MyTemp')) IS NOT NULL

DROP TABLE #MyTemp;

CREATE TABLE #MyTemp (QuestionableColumn CHAR(20));

INSERT INTO #MyTemp (QuestionableColumn)

VALUES ('ABC1GKUCEEF7AR169582'), --Good value

('ABC2G1WG5E37D1157775'), --Good value

('BCD3GTU2TEC9FG119962'), --Good...

Thom A (1/4/2017)

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Brandie Tarvin (1/4/2017)

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Thom A (1/4/2017)

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I'm a little confused,on one part. You stated that "a hyphen is only allowed after the first character", however that the value "ABC-1245Z" is...

drew.allen (1/4/2017)

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But you can...

The main differences between CASE and COALESCE() are that COALESCE() is faster to type and CASE gives you other data manipulation options. Otherwise, they are mostly identical in the way...

Thom A (1/4/2017)

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I'm a little confused,on one part. You stated that "a hyphen is only allowed after the first character", however that the value "ABC-1245Z" is acceptable. The hyphen is...

Or use a CASE statement.

SELECT Col1, Col2,

CASE WHEN cte1.Col IS NULL THEN cte2.Col ELSE cte1.Col END AS MyCol

FROM ....

This assumes that you can join the CTEs to each other...

Siiiiiigggggghhhhh.

You would think when I get an alert that a log file drive is full in a non-prod system the first thing I would look at is whether or not...

Eirikur Eiriksson (12/16/2016)

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Phil Parkin (12/16/2016)

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Grumpy DBA (12/16/2016)

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Wow, today's spam includes a warning about BOOTY POP... dang, just as I was about to order cases of BOOTY POP for my family...

Beware the Twitter list. For it is a way of defining you and boxing you into a corner!

Actually, lists can be followed as a whole (I don't remember how) so...

JustMarie (12/13/2016)

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drew.allen (12/13/2016)

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Does any else think that this response borders on being unethical? http://www.sqlservercentral.com/Forums/FindPost1842475.aspx It sounds like she wants to use this approach just to avoid due...