My stored procedure, sp_dbsettings, allows you to view, in a cross-tabular format, all the common options and their values for all the databases on your server. Optionally, you can pass a database name as an argument if you just want to view the settings for one database (i.e., EXEC sp_dbsettings 'Northwind'). Otherwise it shows info […]
2002-10-09
649 reads
T-SQL's CHARINDEX() function is a useful for parsing out characters within a string. However, it only returns the first occurrence of a character. Oftentimes one needs to locate the Nth instance of a character or a space, which can be a complicated task in standard T-SQL. This function I wrote, imaginatively named CHARINDEX2(), allows one […]
2002-09-27
32,443 reads
The sp_for procedure provides simple single-statement loop processing for T-SQL statements, similar to the FOR command in the C language or the DOS command-line utility by the same name.It's syntax is similar to that of the DOS command. It takes an argument to represent a variable, initialize the variable, set an increment, set an end […]
2002-09-13
907 reads
SQL Server's COUNT() function is a slow and expensive way to count a table's rows because it scans the entire table or index. FASTCOUNT(), which I created, is much more efficient for this purpose - its only drawback being that it may return inaccurate results if a nonlogged (e.g., bulk) data modification operation was recently […]
2002-09-10
858 reads
Let's say you have 2 tables: a Contacts table and a PhoneNumbers table (which stores all the phone numbers for each contact). You are asked to write a query that returns each contact's name and a comma-delimited string of phone numbers for each contact, something like this:FirstName LastName PhoneNumbers--------- -------- --------------------------John […]
2002-07-22
1,035 reads
Say you wanted to create an SP for updating records in a database. How would you do this in such a way as to allow your users to edit only a subset of fields in the record, without overwriting the other fields, and without requiring verbose IF blocks and CASE statements in your code?Simple. Use […]
2002-04-16
211 reads
This short and simple script is a very fast way to count the rows in all your indexed tables. I ran it against a 2-gigabyte database containing large tables (some with over a million rows!), and it returned results in under a second.
2002-03-12
2,884 reads
By Steve Jones
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Comments posted to this topic are about the item Not Just an Upgrade
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Restoring On Top I
I am doing development work on a database and want to keep a backup so I can reset my database. I make some changes and want to restore over top of my changes. When I run this code, what happens?
USE Master BACKUP DATABASE DNRTest TO DISK = 'dnrtest.bak' GO USE DNRTest GO CREATE TABLE MyTest(myid INT) GO USE master RESTORE DATABASE DNRTest FROM DISK = 'dnrtest.bak' WITH REPLACESee possible answers