For easier readability, I always write my hard code dates as 'yyyy-mm-dd'.

Seeing this weird fiscal calendar really intrigues me - never seen or heard of this one.

I wonder how many different fiscal calendars there are out there in the real world.

I...

In fact,...

Jonathan AC Roberts (4/28/2015)

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~ is the T-SQL's bitwise NOT operator. It inverts all the bits in an integer.

It's used so the right-most bit, which is set to 1 two's...

Any particular reason for

~CONVERT(bigint, -9223372036854775808)

instead of

CONVERT(bigint, 9223372036854775807)

My Italian keyboard doesn't have this famous tilde characters! :crying:

Oh crap, forgot all about copy/paste. 🙂

But before swearing at someone, look at the data.

Quite a while back I looked at a table at a customer site designed by another vendor where a quick select *...

Very cute this Mandelbrot output. It reminds me when I did this in the days of IBM STORY BOARD, creating a very beautiful color graphical output sequence.

A query I receive...

Had a good laugh 😀 watching you and Grant performing those competitions showing who can type fasted - with or without SQL Prompt at http://www.red-gate.com/products/sql-development/sql-prompt.

Create a file called tc.vbs with these two lines:

Set objConn = CreateObject("ADODB.Connection")

objConn.Open "PROVIDER=SQLOLEDB;DATA SOURCE=computer\instance;DATABASE=database;USER ID=usr;PASSWORD=pwd"

Then in DOS issue: cscript tc.vbs

But, I really like that udl trick...

I'm using a general purpose logging table where any part of the application (backend or frontend) can log to. I'm curious to know what your table(s) look like. Naturally, the...

Jeff, so what was the trick?

I guess when you need to execute something only once and it takes 900 miliseconds you give it no further thought.

Still, getting anything at all...

Jeff Moden (12/28/2014)

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As a bit of a sidebar, it's a shame that CTEs are truly treated as inline views and that a single self-join of a CTE causes two executions...

Eric M Russell (12/17/2014)

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DonlSimpson (12/17/2014)

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As a side note, on some RDMS platforms, various stubbed values are treated literally as NULL. For example, Oracle treats an empty string as NULL.

...

By the term 'in the real world' I meant: actually used in some SQL code (or non SQL code) in a real software implementation.

And there is yet another variant:

SELECT Y + X AS Position

FROM (VALUES ('01'), ('02'), ('03'), ('04'), ('05'), ('06'), ('07'), ('08'), ('09'), ('10')) AS X(X)

join

(VALUES ('A'),...