The next set of introductory T-SQL topics that I want to talk about is how to change data and/or data types. The first issue is dealing with NULL values.
Once you get your head around the idea that NULL means the lack of a value (NULL isn’t a value), you might need to replace NULL values with something else. While you could just do that with a CASE statement, T-SQL provides two built-in functions for doing this.
2021-01-04
Hi Folks,
Just wanted to make a post to wish you all a happy new year for 2021.
I doubt there’s anyone much on the planet who didn’t have a very, very peculiar, or very, very difficult 2020, and while there’s a glimmer of hope with the virus now as vaccines arrive, I suspect that 2021 is still going to be dominated by the coronavirus, and a very tough year for so many.
2021-01-01
I was really excited today to see details of the upcoming #dataweek. Anything with a name like that already has my interest.
In this case though, there’s a #CreateData event that’s happening as part of #dataweek. And the focus of that looks to be on Azure Synapse Analytics.
I know that many of my readers won’t have spent much time with Azure Synapse Analytics. The product has grown out of Azure SQL Data Warehouse (note not Azure SQL Database) but it’s now much more than just an upgraded Azure SQL DW.
2020-11-25
I was really pleased to get to record a SQL Down Under podcast with an old friend Pedro Lopes recently. Pedro is a Principal Program Manager with Microsoft in the Azure Data SQL Server area.
A year or so back, I had Joe Sack on the show telling us where Intelligent Query processing was heading, and Pedro now fills us in on where it’s got to.
We recorded the show earlier in this month but I couldn’t release it until after the PASS summit where some of the features were announced.
2020-11-23
I work with a lot of technology on a daily basis, much of it amazing. But I still get excited when relatively small enhancements are made, and they make my life or development much better.
Timezone support in schedule triggers in Azure Data Factory is one of those changes.
In Data Factory, the most common type of trigger that we use is a schedule trigger. It’s used to run a pipeline at a specific time or series of times. But one of the most painful aspects of these triggers is that they didn’t have time zone support.
2020-11-04
When I’m working in client sites, I get really concerned when I see personal data not being handled or protected appropriately. And one of the biggest sins that I see is where developers have pretended to be encrypting data, but they really aren’t encrypting it.
I’m sure that looks good for a manager but please, just don’t do this !
When I look at the table definition shown in the main image above, my eye is drawn to the column called EncryptedTFN. In Australia, we refer to our tax numbers as TFNs. They are 11 digits long for most people and should never be stored in plain text in a database. The column should be encrypted.
2020-10-27
I’m pleased to let you know that version 20 of our free SDU Tools for developers and DBAs is now released. It’s all SQL Server and T-SQL goodness.
If you haven’t been using SDU Tools yet, I’d suggest downloading them and taking a look. At the very least, it can help when you’re trying to work out how to code something in T-SQL. You’ll find them here:
https://sdutools.sqldownunder.com
Along with the normal updates to SQL Server versions and builds, we’ve added the following new functions:
2020-10-22
Once again today, I was asked by a developer, how you can “turn off those annoying completion time messages in SSMS”.
A few releases of SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) back, the product team decided that we’d all like completion times shown in the Messages output tab. I don’t share their enthusiasm for them.
For a start, a completion time was already shown here in the Properties window for the query, along with much more info:
2020-10-21
We had a new house built a while back, and in a few rooms there was a double switch: one for the light and one for a fan.
But which is which?
Now the old way to do that would have been to put a label on each one. Seems like a reasonable idea but unless that’s a braille label, and you can read braille, that’s not going to help you in the dark. You want to just reach in and turn on the correct switch. That’s easy enough to do, but it really only works if the electrician who installed them followed a pattern i.e. the switch furthest inside might be the light, and the one closest to the door might be the fan.
2020-10-20
I was reading posts in an email distribution list yesterday and someone asked if SQL Server Replication was deprecated. First up, let’s just confirm that it’s not. As Mark Twain said: “The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated”. There’s still a really strong need for it, and somewhat ironically, that need has been getting stronger lately.
Back when replication was introduced, it had a bit of a reputation for being hard to set up, and hard to look after. It was in the same category as features like clustering. If I was teaching a SQL Server 6.5 class, you could tell which students could follow instructions if they managed to get clustering working. Fortunately, it’s nothing like that today but you’ll still hear from people with “old pain”.
2020-10-15
