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.

External Article

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

BIT_COUNT II

In SQL Server 2025, I have a table (dbo.UserPermission) that contains this data:

UserID  UserPermissions
15
23
37
4       NULL
What is returned when I run this code:
select bit_count(UserPermissions) as PermissionCount
from dbo.UserPermission
where UserID = 4;

See possible answers