Instead of treating dates and time as if you were still writing 1960s COBOL and have to use strings, why not take a calendar table approach? SQL would call quarter...

>> Are you suggesting that the CREATE SEQUENCE statement itself would add the check digits, any required punctuation, or prefixes? <<

No, it have to add code in that sort procedure...

The short answer is that both the in fixed operator and set oriented where clause forms of an inner join produce the same results. An inner join is an inner...

>> Joe, do you convert back to numeric to get your next successive order number and then convert back to character data? With all the back and forth about STORING...

This request makes absolutely no sense. The first property they should have taught you in your SQL class is that the rows in the table have no ordering! It models...

>> Why can I not create a new column and add 90 days to the date in column P_INDATE in MS SQL Server? <<

Why don't you put this computation in...

I'm assuming that an invoice number uses a nominal scale. This is not a magnitude or quantity. That means it has to be a character string, but perhaps we could have...

I used to set type, decades ago. This is the actual name of what you probably call a hash. Or do you call it a pound sign (it weighs 5#)...

ISO standards forbid embedded spaces in the encodings. There's also a set of Unicode characters that have to be used. It's the digits, Latin letters, and a limited set of...

Have you ever heard the story about Levitan the tailor? It's a very old comedy routine from the 1930s.. A customer comes into the shop looking for a suit. Levitan...

>>I should like to see Microsoft consider adding more in-built statistical functions given the way that the BI world is heading. I should also like to see some focusing on...

I've written an entire book on this topic (Joe Celko's SQL programming style, ISBN 9780120887972). No, I am not going to post 200+ pages of text; you can get a...

In your case, I would use the ISO-8601 week-date format. You can downoad such a calendar from the internet. The format is yyyyW[0-5][0-9]-[1-7] where the week is 01-53, depending on...

>> another block of bullshit - we don't think of COBOL - neither does COBOL PIC behave the same way as DB datatypes

COBOL PIC 9(9)V9(3) = SQL decimal(12,3) - how...

>> THIS coming from the person that says he likes the MySQL "standard" of using YYYY-00-00 as the notation for whole years and YYYY-MM-00 for whole months. What a line...