Sean Lange (4/2/2013)

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The biggest take away from this is that you should ALWAYS use the datetime datatype for datetime values. Using a varchar for dates just doesn't make sense. You...

As you inferred, I needed to use dynamic SQL to get the results you want. From your example I wasn't able to get the XML nodes and your tables to...

i'm afraid this task isn't as easy as it may sound. The difficulty comes from the complexity of credit card number formulation. Now let's assume we just want to find...

Here's another solution. Entirely set based and no rounding approximations. Returns the current, previous, and cumulative discount for each row in the source table.

IF OBJECT_ID('tempdb..#TestData') IS NOT NULL

DROP TABLE #TestData

;WITH...

Here's two procedures I use for very thorough data validation. These procedures are much more reliable than ISDATE because ISDATE may return different results when converting from a string depending...

This sounds like something better handled at the application level. An application like DotNetNuke (which is free BTW) is well-developed for securely handling individual or group roles. Then if any...

Sen1 (3/26/2013)

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Hello experts,

I need to encrypt 4 col. in sql server 2008 and decrypt again. Do I have to do one column at a time or all together, if somebody...

I haven't tested any of these options for performance. On a small data set all of them will probably perform OK. But if you are going to use this in...

Jeff Moden (3/24/2013)

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Steven Willis (3/24/2013)

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I'm in the middle of an archiving project right now. The customer has a single database instance on a shared server with a major host and...

I'm in the middle of an archiving project right now. The customer has a single database instance on a shared server with a major host and isn't running enterprise edition...

Try this procedure. You may have to make some modifications to fit your XML structure. And what you do with the output is up to you.

CREATE PROCEDURE dbo.ParseXML

...

DECLARE

@strXML NVARCHAR(4000)

,@XML XML

IF OBJECT_ID('tempdb..#Sub') IS NOT NULL

DROP TABLE #Sub

IF OBJECT_ID('tempdb..#Contact') IS NOT NULL

DROP TABLE #Contact

CREATE TABLE #Sub (

...

Mickey...that sure beats my solution by a mile. I don't know why I didn't split the data into columns right from the beginning instead of trying to parse the strings...

Does this return anything?

IF OBJECT_ID ( N'msdb.dbo.dbm_monitor_data', N'U' ) IS NULL

SELECT 'No data'

ELSE

SELECT * FROM msdb.dbo.dbm_monitor_data

or this?

SELECT

...

[EDIT: Mickey's solution in a post below is MUCH better. Even though this solution "worked," it's admittedly convoluted. Mickey's method also avoids use of a cursor which is almost always...