And one more for luck:

If you are looking to strip a local variable:

DECLARE @strVariable VARCHAR(100)

SELECT @strVariable = '| hello | world | I love sql server'

--== Only strip out...

I would say it does not calculate it twice.

You can try it yourself by viewing the text or xml execution plan for the query- it will be obvious if it...

Thanks for a good question.

Hugo Kornelis (11/18/2010)

Carlo Romagnano (11/18/2010)

Hugo Kornelis (11/17/2010)Without the reversal, the question would have been a solid test of whether people know about the dangers of using CASE in ORDER BY,...

All,

Thanks for taking the time to explain things to me - this is certainly a tricky subject and I appreciate your help.

All interesting points, which I also will have to investigate.

The only reason for not including Paul's safety check was that it was not in the Article which is where I...

Hello All,

I have been playing with the QU code in Jeff's article and discovered a couple of things....

It seems you CAN update in any order you like regardless of the...

I don't know if I like being hashed like that! :hehe:

Hugo Kornelis (11/4/2010)

It does. The code window has a scroll bar at the bottom; you'll find the...

Thanks to those of you who appreciate this question.

To those who think it had unnecessary "tricks" in it, I did try several variants of this question and they all ended...

Hi Daniel, good question!

Microsoft http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms190309.aspx

When an operator combines two expressions of different data types, the rules for...

@chris-2 - but how do you select only the 3rd Salary?

;with ranked_data as

(

select name,salary,DENSE_RANK() OVER(order by salary,name,(SELECT X FROM (SELECT 1) a(a) CROSS APPLY(SELECT RAND(CHECKSUM(NEWID()))) b(X)) ) as position

from SAL

)

select *

from ranked_data

where...

I understand - and I am a beginner at graciousness - forgive my comment...

You sure you should be writing SQL? You don't want to count the varchars, but varchar the count...

WHEN COUNT(customer_id) = 0 THEN 'No customers'

ELSE CONVERT(varchar(20),COUNT(customer_id))