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 designing a data schema to store a variety of entities it can be common to require a selection of flags to be stored. There are different ways in which the data can be designed to accommodate this which I wanted to look at here. Examples of these fields could be an ‘Is Active’ flag […]
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 […]
A couple of weeks back we looked at how to implement DDL triggers in a database and briefly created a couple as examples. This time we’ll put that into use with a particular purpose: to audit modifications to our database schema. Storing the audit Before we get to the trigger we want to create a table to […]
Last time out we looked at implementing DDL triggers in SQL Server and today we’re going to look at the other commonly used trigger – DML. What are DML triggers DML triggers are used to react to events caused by data manipulation language (DML) statements. These events are targeted to a specific table or view and so […]
In SQL Server we have the ability to create triggers to respond to events occurring within our databases or across the server. These typically come in two varieties – DDL and DML triggers. Here we’ll look at what DDL triggers are and how to implement them. What are DDL triggers A DDL trigger is a […]
When creating items in SQL Server we aren’t able to create multiple with the same name, for example two tables named dbo.Sales. Similarly we couldn’t create a table and view with the same name. However it isn’t the case that everything we create within a database has to be named uniquely. It can depend on […]
It’s that time of the month again and this invitation from Reitse has asked us about some fun we’ve had with T-SQL in the past. Whilst I’ve used SQL Server over the years and it’s features as part of various solutions for others, I enjoy the time I can put it to work for solving […]
Andy Brownsword 