Comma Delimited List with COALESCE
There may be a day when you need to create your own comma delimited list from data contained in a SQL table. Sure you could build a cursor and go through each row adding a comma after each record. The...
Category: SQL Server
Server ‘SERVERNAME’ is not configured for RPC
I recently was doing some development on my local machine and needed to pull data from a linked server. I set up the linked server and everything was working great. Executing queries to pull the data to my machine was...
Removing The Date From The End of a String
Occasionally there may be the need to remove the date from the end of a string. This can be accomplished by using PATINDEX along with SUBSTRING. We will use PATINDEX to find where the date begins and then SUBSTRING to remove the...
Joining Tables That Contain NULL Values
As you can see we have two tables, with the same values. Joining on these tables is no problem at all. Simple, right? Well, take a look at what happens when we try to join on the column containing the NULL values....
Calculate the Date of Previous Sunday
There are a number of ways that you can calculate dates using T-SQL. A common practice is to find the first day of the week which can be accomplished easily by using the following function. SELECT DATEADD(wk, DATEDIFF(wk,0,GETDATE()), 0) However,...
Use SQL from the Command Line
More often than not an execute SQL task in SSIS will do the trick. If not, then the data flow will accomplish whatever objective is set out. Occasionally those can become cumbersome in a package to accomplish something simple. In...
SQL Maintenance Plan Doesn't Delete Backups
I recently created a maintenance plan for our server to backup all the databases on a daily basis. In the cleanup step I set it to delete backups older than 7 day. I let the plan run for a week...
SQL UPDATE Using a Join
You may need to do an update on joined tables to get a more conditional update. For instance, I have a Student table as well as an AcademicStatus table. The Student table contains all the students (profound, I know) and...
Saving Changes Is Not Permitted
Have you ever created a table thinking everything looked amazing and was designed perfect only to come back and need to add to it? Maybe you need to change a data type, add a column, delete a column or move...
Database Design
Designing a database can be a daunting task, especially on a large scale. There are several ways inside of SQL Server Management Studio to do design. You could create your database and right click on the ‘Tables’ node and enter...