User-defined Data Type Basics
This article discusses an often-overlooked feature of SQL Server called user-defined data types.
2002-12-17
8,205 reads
Don Frazier
FirstDayOfMonth() and LastDayOfMonth() functions
Here are a couple of handy date functions that pretty much describe themselves. You can use these to figure out how many days are left in a month.
2002-12-08
625 reads
zPad() - add leading zeros to a number
This user-defined function converts a number to character format and adds leading zeroes to pad the field to a specified length. useful for displaying SSNs or other numeric fields where the leading 0's are significant but the field is stored as numeric.To use:select dbo.zPad(, )make sure your length includes an extra column for the sign. […]
2002-12-05
425 reads
Convert a number to words
This is a handy function that converts a number (integer) into its word format. This might be handy if you need to print a check formatted number in words. Currently it supports an integer but it would be almost nothing to convert to support a bigint or decimal.The components are1) a table named PlaceValue that […]
2002-12-04
365 reads
PACK() user defined function
Convert a decimal number to IBM EBCDIC packed decimal format. If for some reason you need to export a number to IBM systems in native format, you can define a SQL Server field as binary(8) and Pack() your decimal number into it. Then IBM mainframes and COBOL/CICS systems can read the numbers from your data […]
2002-12-04
545 reads
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Question of the Day
Missing the Jaro Winkler Distance
I upgraded a SQL Server 2019 instance to SQL Server 2025. I wanted to test the fuzzy string search functions. I run this code:
SELECT JARO_WINKLER_DISTANCE('tim', 'tom')
I get this error message:Msg 195, Level 15, State 10, Line 1 'JARO_WINKLER_DISTANCE' is not a recognized built-in function name.What is wrong? See possible answers