>> I remember learning Algol during a teacher strike while I was in High School back when dinosaurs still roamed the land. I actually liked the language. <<

I learned Fortran...

A little bit of history here. The ANSI/ISO Standards committee decided that the grammar for SQL would be LALR(1). One of the committee members had access to a really good...

You might want to look up how the old Sybase money data types work. They round too soon and give the wrong answers. Google it. This is why competent SQL...

You don't seem to know that a table must have a key to be valid. This is usually covered the first week of any RDBMS class. What you posted is...

Look up the order in which the clauses in a select statement are executed in SQL. The actual SELECT list is the last one performed, so your alias doesn't exist...

The first thing we need to do is correct your DDL. By definition, a table must have a key; this is not an option! Since all of your columns are...

https://www.red-gate.com/simple-talk/sql/t-sql-programming/contiguous-time-periods/

>> I have a table like this. <<

Where is the DDL? For over 30 years, netiquette has been to post DDL on SQL forms. Now we have to take all...

>> Have I confused the question even more? <<

Yes. Did you read the part about posting DDL in these SQL forms? You really need a bASic course in data modeling;...

>> How do I exclude the "Appointments" that are not adjacent to a "Discharge"? <<

Your problem is the true data model is wrong. An appointment is made up of two...

I personally hate variable length codes. They make for messy screen displays and even worse printouts. However, you can pad the unused levels in the encoding with zeros or even...

>> I have a set of 7 INTEGER columns in a table. My goal is I'm trying to create a unique key/integer <<

Why? While very unusual, and something I've never...

Will this regular expression validate (in part) your encoding scheme?

Foobar LIKE '[a-z][ 0-9][ 0-9][ a-z][ a-z][ 0-9][ 0-9]'

When I was on the ANSI X3 H2 standards committee, we introduced the idea of single quotes for character strings in the SQL language. I personally think this was a...

>> I have a table containing a set of records [sic] which has a field [sic] called seasonal_address_id. This is not always populated. <<

You get a chance, please read the...