Clipper was the first programming language I used in anger in a real job, I really enjoyed working with it. At the same company I also designed and implemented an...

On the self-driving car thing, it weould be much easier if all cars were self-driving. Take the human idiot factor out of it and it instantly becomes simpler, especially in...

This. If I'm talking to someone in the industry then I'll be more specific. If not, people's eyes tend to glaze over if you give...

Using IF EXISTS would be a way to go about this.

IF EXISTS(SELECT UserName FROM Foo WHERE UserName = @UserName)

INSERT...

ELSE

UPDATE...

I would advocate going down the NULL route. It's a new column after all and when that column is referenced by the calling application, that application should know what it...

Great article. And I love the Sesame Street reference 😀

Sorry, I misunderstood. Creating a function to do the work could be the answer, something like the following:

CREATE FUNCTION MyFunc (@CutOffDate varchar(6))

RETURNS INT

AS

BEGIN

DECLARE @Qty INT

SELECT @Qty = SUM(QUANTITY)

FROM ...

Hi,

You just call the stored procedure with parameter after the procedure name as in the following example:

CREATE PROCEDURE MyProc

@CutOffDate varchar(6)

AS

INSERT INTO testtable (Quantity, YearMonth)

SELECT SUM(QUANTITY) AS TotalQty, @CutOffDate

FROM ...

The auditing (or not) of these Excel application that are created by various people around the business is what is the most dangerous thing. I have done a fair bit...

As with Jeff above, I don't really use anything much apart from the standard tools for my job SSMS, Visual Studio, Office and a couple of specific business systems. I...

lanky,

I think you're doing your formatting in the wrong place, you need to do the formatting to hh:mm after the SUM is done. See following example:

DECLARE @tester TABLE...

lanky,

% gives you the modulo, that is, it divides the first number by the second number and gives you the remainder. So in your example, 177 % 10 will give...

To make Luis' code a little more generic, you could code it as follows:

SELECT

SUBSTRING(String,CHARINDEX('email=',String)+6

,CASE WHEN CHARINDEX(';',String,CHARINDEX('email=',String)+6) = 0

THEN LEN(string)

ELSE CHARINDEX(';',String,CHARINDEX('email=',String)+6)-(CHARINDEX('email=',String)+6) END) AS [Email]

,SUBSTRING(String,CHARINDEX('rota=',String)+5

,CASE WHEN CHARINDEX(';',String,CHARINDEX('rota=',String)+5) = 0

THEN LEN(string)

ELSE CHARINDEX(';',String,CHARINDEX('rota=',String)+5)-(CHARINDEX('rota=',String)+5)...

We have a team meeting for all people from all our offices here in the UK in a few weeks time and I'm looking forward to it much for the...

I think I will be involved in the technology side of things until I retire, at least I hope so. I like the challenge of solving problems and the just...