Technical Article

Building a 24 x 7 Database

Over the last few years, corporations have invested billions of dollars to integrate the automations of core business systems in large ERP applications. This paper looks at the risk of downtime and solutions for building an around-the-clock database.

SQLServerCentral Article

SQL MAIL Using POP3 and SMTP

SQL Server has a great build in messaging system with SQLMail. Unfortunately it requires Outlook and Exchange to work properly. Some people don't like this or do not run Exchange and have issues getting it to work. Gregory Larsen takes a look at how you can use SMTP to send email from SQL Server.

Technical Article

Updating Data in Linked Servers, Information Schema Views, and More

E
very day a developer somewhere needs to write code to iterate through SQL Server™ system objects, query and update tables in linked servers, handle optimistic concurrency, and retrieve column and stored procedure metadata. In this month's column, I will address these and other T-SQL development scenarios based on some of the questions I most frequently receive from readers.

Technical Article

Writing Secure Transact-SQL

There are plenty of good sources of information about how to deploy SQL Server in a secure fashion. However, these resources are often targeted at database administrators tasked with securing already developed applications. In addition, there is a rich body of information that discusses writing secure .NET and ASP.NET code, including .NET code that accesses SQL Server. However, many of these resources focus on the data access code that runs on the application servers rather than the Transact-SQL (T-SQL) code that executes within SQL Server. Developing T-SQL code that runs securely on SQL Server is the primary focus of this column.

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Where Your Value Separates You from Others

By Steve Jones - SSC Editor

Comments posted to this topic are about the item Where Your Value Separates You...

Fixing the Error

By Steve Jones - SSC Editor

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T-SQL in SQL Server 2025: Encoding Functions

By Steve Jones - SSC Editor

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Question of the Day

Fixing the Error

On SQL Server 2025, I have a database that has this collation: SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS. I decide I want to run this code:

SELECT UNISTR('*3041*308A*304C*3068 and good night', '*') AS 'A Classic';
I get this error:Msg 9844, Level 16, State 4, Line 24 The char/varchar input type uses an unsupported collation. Only a UTF8 collation is supported with char/varchar input type in UNISTR function.What is the easiest way to fix this error?

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