Scripts

Technical Article

sp_ServerStatus

Have you ever wanted to check that a server exists before using it. Here is a solution that use SQLDMO from within TSQL to get the status of a SQL Server service. It also works for 2000 instances. I have named it sp_ServerStatus for it to be based in master.This returns the status integer and […]

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2002-11-14

620 reads

Technical Article

sp_xml_PrepareDocumentFromColumn

Do you want to use OPENXML with an xml document in a table, this procdure will do it for you.Pass in the SQL that will return the column of data, it will return the document handle which can then be used with OPENXML.ExampleDROP TABLE TabCREATE TABLE Tab (doc ntext)INSERT INTO Tab VALUES ('' + REPLICATE('' […]

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2002-11-14

549 reads

Technical Article

Function and SP to find if file/directory exists

This function and stored procedure can be used to easily identify if a file, directory or parent directory exist. It wraps the functionality of xp_fileExist but gives easy access to the directory and parent directory exist values.To use it the function pass in the file or path and either 'IsFile', 'IsDir' or 'HasParentDir' it will […]

(3)

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2002-11-13

3,892 reads

Technical Article

INSTR Function

INSTR searches string for substring. --> position is an integer indicating the character of string where SQL Server begins the search. -->If position is negative, SQL Server counts and searches backward from the end of string. occurrence is an integer indicating which occurrence of string SQL Server should search for. The value of occurrence must […]

(2)

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2002-11-12

1,378 reads

Technical Article

sp_kill

This stored proc has helped me a lot when I needed to restore db, reconfigure replication, and do other database jobs. SQL server KILL command can only act on a single spid. This sp compiles KILL commands in a cursor to kill a group of spids based on database name, login name, host machine name […]

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2002-11-11

6,220 reads

Technical Article

Converting Binary data to a Hex Character String

Occassionally you might want to convert a binary number into some printable string.   This would allow you display some meaning fully numbers hex characters, instead of just some unreadable garbage.  This script takes a binary field, of basically any length, and converts it, character by character, to a character string.  The character string will contain […]

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2002-11-07

485 reads

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Question of the Day

Tracking All the Queries

I have 3 instances of a brand new long running query that are executing on a SQL Server 2025 instance. Query store is enabled. One of the queries is killed by the administrator, one is cancelled by the user. The other runs to completion. How many rows are in Query Store for this query?

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