To provide data analysis you may need to perform some basic trend analysis. For example, if you want to identify the percentage of change in the number of orders received from one month to the next. The challenge to providing that on the fly is the change can be either an increase or a decrease, […]
2007-03-02 (first published: 2007-01-25)
6,521 reads
For fellow Canadians and neighbours to the south, you may find useful a function to validate the formatting of a Canadian postal code. More than once I've had to work with web programmers on checking that a postal code meets the A1A1A1 style, so carry around a function that simply returns a true/false bit if […]
2007-01-15 (first published: 2007-01-05)
1,080 reads
There are many ways to format dates, and rather that reinvent the wheel each time I've found it helpful to have a user defined function always available. As a function it of courses processes on each row, and to enable the most flexibility the formatting style is passed simply as a parameter. Year month and […]
2005-08-31 (first published: 2005-08-25)
475 reads
Came across a great script from Ken Kaufman on copying backups using xp_cmdshell. Thought I'd contribute a script I wrote that builds on that to restore the latest production backup to a testing or development server. In this case I routinely create all my production backups to a network share and then use that source […]
2002-12-16
652 reads
By Steve Jones
If someone is trying to convince you it’s not a pyramid scheme, it’s a...
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...
Hi experts, I have a 3+ TB database on a 2019 sql server which...
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
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