One of the most time consuming tasks in Management Studio is repeating the same changes across multiple lines of a query. The answer to this? – Multi Line (or Column Mode) Editing. Here’s a quick post to explain what it is, how to do it, and examples to see it in action. What is multi […]
A few weeks back we looked at options for storing multiple boolean flag values in a table. One of the options we considered was the use of a Bit Mask where we packed multiple flags into a single field. When we have individual fields within a table, using and manipulating those is straightforward. However when we’ve got […]
Whilst we have front-end code which requires faster response times, there are also times we build code with the purpose of running for extended periods of time. Examples of this could be maintenance routine, or custom built queuing mechanisms. The way in which we design longer running processes like this can be key when it […]
We store a wide variety of data within our platforms, some of which will inevitably be string based. Along with that comes a need to perform manipulation of those strings. When slicing, combining, or manipulating strings one element which we need to consider is the length of the string. Here I wanted to have a […]
When writing functions within SQL Server we sometimes have need to repeat an action multiple times until a given condition is met – also known as Recursion. There are a couple of common ways which this can be implemented which also have their different limitations. A little about recursion Firstly, why do we need recursion? […]
When processing data there is frequently a need to rank the outputs. This could be to limit a selection of records to return, or provide a type of leader-board for reporting. There are a number of ranking functions within the SQL language which we’ll look at here with examples and outputs. We’ll start with some […]
When outputting data through a procedure it’s a common use case to add fields which have been calculated from existing data. One way to achieve this is using the CASE statement, however we don’t always need that level of complexity, particularly when we’re looking for a binary result such as ‘Yes’ / ‘No’. An alternative […]
We’ve previously looked at how to implement vertical partitioning and the benefits it can bring within our data. Here I’d like to dive a little further into improving the performance even further with a couple of modifications to our schema. We’ll use the same setup as we had previously to create the table, populate it and partition it. This results in […]
We recently looked at implementing vertical partitioning on a set of data. In an earlier introduction post we also mentioned the benefits which can be seen as a result of the partitioning in both our maintenance and querying of the data. Here we’ll take a look at those benefits with a little more evidence. We’ll be using the data […]
Within SQL Server we can store Boolean data using the BIT data type. This value is a single bit which will store a True or False (or null) value. However if you dive a little deeper with the data type it’s actually a little less clear cut in terms of the storage needed for this data type. […]
Andy Brownsword 