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The IDENTITY Column Property

There are a number of ways to generate key values in SQL Server tables including the IDENTITY column property, the NEWID() function and more recently, SEQUENCES. The IDENTITY column property is the earliest of these methods. It was introduced very early in the history of SQL Server and it is arguably the simplest approach. Though old, IDENTITY is still maintained in modern versions of SQL Server and is still relevant for simple use cases.

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Run SQL Server Agent Job from SSIS

While we can schedule SQL Server Agent jobs and SSRS report subscriptions, the actual time that we want to run them is dependent on when certain processing in our SSIS packages is completed. We also have certain business rules surrounding launching these jobs that we need to enforce which the built-in scheduling capabilities cannot accommodate. For example, we execute a SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) report subscription every Monday at 8:00AM but we want to skip it if the current week coincides with our month end processing which will also execute a report subscription for the same report. Can you provide a solution that we can use to accomplish this?

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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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