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Career Book Reviews

Working in the corporate world can be a challenge and most of us muddle through our careers without really having any formal training. Andy Warren has spent time proactively working on his career and learned a great many tips and tricks for succeeeding as an employee and a manager. He brings us a few book reviews that might help you cope with the strange corporate world in which so many of us work.

External Article

SQLChess - A tutorial on thinking in sets

Chess makes a fantastic game for programming examples. You will find hundreds of examples on the internet. Some dedicated to OO patterns, others to algorithms and so forth. Unfortunately, most of these examples do not use a database or if they do, treat the database as nothing more than a storage repository. In this series of articles we will use SQL Server and T-SQL to implement the game of chess with an emphasis on thinking in sets.

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Returning a week number for any given date and starting fiscal month

Sql Server comes with a host of built in functions such as ISNULL, CONVERT and CAST. Now if that wasn't enough rope to hang ourselves with, as of Sql Server 2000 we gained the ability to create our own user defined functions. In this article I will be looking at the three main date functions DATEADD, DATEPART and DATEDIFF (there is a fourth called DATENAME but I want to get to the end of this article before you fall asleep so I decided to leave it for another date and time! And no it doesn't foretell the name of your future blind date so it's not as interesting as it sounds anyway) Then I will be combining all three in a user defined function of our own by which time our necks will be well and truly stretched

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Question of the Day

Encoding URLs

I have this data in a SQL Server 2025 table:

CREATE TABLE Response
( ResponseID INT NOT NULL CONSTRAINT ResponsePK PRIMARY KEY
, ResponseVal VARBINARY(5000)
)
GO
If I want to get a value from this table that I can add to a URL in a browser, which of these code items produces a result I can use?

See possible answers