I have come across a lot of use cases for manufacturing rows on the fly, aside from the common goal of populating a large data set such as a numbers or calendar table. A few favorites include building sample data, pivoting an unknown number of columns, data extrapolation, and filling gaps in date or time ranges.
2023-07-26
In this article, learn how to query cached query statistics and execution plans for Oracle or SQL Server to identify code that can be optimized to improve performance.
2023-07-21
In this article, we look at a sample use case of how you can create SQLCMD batch files that can be interactive and reused in different SQL Server environments.
2023-07-14
My SQL Server backups and restores fail infrequently, but when I find out it is too late. How can I find out sooner?
2023-07-03
The ability to pause and then resume index rebuilds has been added to SQL Server. This is a fantastic feature, and with the release of SQL Server 2019, we can now replicate it on the actual create index process. Learn how to use this feature in this short article.
2023-06-26
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It seems like every DBA has a USB stick or a shared drive filled with scripts they can pull up in almost any situation. How can I build such a library of T-SQL files?
2023-06-26
Deadlocks can occur in any database system, and SQL Server is no exception. In this article, we look at the steps I used to detect and resolve deadlocks in stored procedures.
2023-06-23
SQL Server supports working with JSON data and provides many different functions that can be used. SQL Server 2022 has expanded the ability to check if the JSON format is valid using the ISJSON function which we will cover in this article.
2023-06-19
SQL Server Auditing utilizes Extended Events in SQL Server. Although it is a feature-rich native solution available in all editions, you'll realize that when you start configuring the Audit and Specifications the filter options are not that widely documented or intuitive.
2023-06-05
I enjoyed writing scripts to manage the servers, as it taught me a lot about the internals of SQL Server. Many of these scripts were eventually automated using SQL Server’s agent to run and save data on the different servers so we could review the results, looking for issues.
2023-05-31
By Steve Jones
I was looking back at my year and decided to see if SQL Prompt...
In the era of cloud-native applications, Kubernetes has become the default standard platform for...
By Steve Jones
I’ve often done some analysis of my year in different ways. Last year I...
Comments posted to this topic are about the item The North Star for the...
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Multiple Escape Characters
Hi, below i show various results trying to reach our ftp site (a globalscape...
In SQL Server 2025, I run this code (in a database with the appropriate collation):
SELECT UNISTR('%*3041%*308A%*304C%*3068 and good night', '%*') AS 'A Classic';
What is returned? See possible answers