I'm also curious if anyone knows if MS is working on any future Mask() function for T-SQL that would do this kind of thing but on a much more flexible...

First off let me thank everyone who took the time to repy back on this; I know the whole NULL issue can ofetn be as dangerous to discuss as politics....

Jack Corbett (2/9/2009)

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I modified the code in the script to fix this oversight. Steve just needs to release the updated code. Here it is here as well:

SELECT

...

Thanks for the feedback Vishal.

Jason Miller (4/7/2009)

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Michael Valentine Jones (4/6/2009)

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YSLGuru (4/6/2009)

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I don't see how the example you gave would give...

Jason Miller (4/6/2009)

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And the follow-up where,

select Col1, Col2, count(*)

from dbo.MyTable

GROUP BY Col1, Col2;

select Col1, Col2, count(*)

from dbo.MyTable

GROUP BY Col2, Col1;

Are not...

GSquared (4/3/2009)

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YSLGuru (4/3/2009)

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GSquared (4/3/2009)

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T-SQL is clunky in certain regards. For example, why doesn't this work:

select Col1, count(*)

from dbo.MyTable;

SQL Server will raise an error that Col1 is neither contained in...

I believe you'll find most who complain about SET based languages are those who first learned procedural based language(s) and therefore have a hard time transitioning to a SET BASED...

GSquared (4/3/2009)

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T-SQL is clunky in certain regards. For example, why doesn't this work:

select Col1, count(*)

from dbo.MyTable;

SQL Server will raise an error that Col1 is neither contained in a Group...

GilaMonster (3/24/2009)

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Converting to varchar and back is a poor way of getting the start of month. It's much slower than using date functions.

select dateadd(mm, datediff(mm,0, getdate()),0)

Then the formatting to not...

Another great question posted by Michael Valentine Jones

Why not at least produce the year and month in a sortable form?

select YearMonth = convert(varchar(7),getdate(),121)

Results:

YearMonth

---------

2009-03

I have links to a lot...

Below was posted in response to a copy of this posting that was not supposed to have gone up yet:

From Bruce W Cassidy:

Okay, some thoughts:

The first is, do you really...

Thanks Mohit

BTW ... I must be the only person on the planet, aside from the actors in the Vista commercials, who has had no problems with Vista and likes...

While everyone & every entity is cost conscious, the Enterprise level users place far greater value on consistency. To a corporation running SQL Server Farms with terabyte sixed data...