Some time back, we added DateOfEasterSunday to our free SDU Tools for developers and DBAs. Given it was the Christian Easter Sunday, almost immediately, I got a request for the Greek Orthodox Easter. That date isn’t of course just the Greek one, so we’ve added a new function DateOfOrthodoxEaster.
It’s based on a concept from Antonios Chatzipavlis. Thanks !
It takes a single parameter:
@Year int - the year to find the date for
2021-02-12
In our free SDU Tools for developers and DBAs, we have a lot of procedures and functions for checking system and database configuration details. One that we were asked for a function for, was the ability to check if the LockPagesInMemory (LPIM) setting was enabled, so we added that.
The function is called IsLockPagesInMemoryEnabled.
It takes no parameters, and returns a bit to indicate if the value is enabled or not.
2021-02-05
I’ve had a lot of good feedback about the options that we’ve provided in our free SDU Tools for developers and DBAs for formatting strings. Someone recently asked for a format with all capitals and dashes in between. I realised we didn’t have that, and we’ve added it. Generally, in the industry, this is referred to as Cobol Case.
So, we added a function CobolCase.
It takes one parameter:
2021-01-29
I spend a lot of time doing data conversion work. It’s hard to imagine how much of that relates to working with dates and times. A requirement that I had recently was to find the nearest weekday to a given date i.e. find me the closest Thursday to a supplied date.
The NearestWeekday function in our free SDU Tools for developers and DBAs, does this.
It takes two parameters:
@TargetDate date - the date that we’re aiming for @DayOfWeek int - Sunday = 1, Monday = 2, Tuesday = 3, etc. (values from 1 to 7)
2021-01-22
I do a lot of data conversion work each month. Many systems store date and time values in Unix format, so I often need to convert to/from these in T-SQL. Fortunately it’s easy.
A common way that Unix systems store the date and time value, is to store the number of seconds since the beginning of 1970.
The DateTime2ToUnixTime and UnixTimeToDateTime2 functions in our free SDU Tools for developers and DBAs, does this.
2021-01-15
I try to allow strings in my applications to use all the richness of the available character sets. If someone has an accent in their name, I really want to repeat it back that way. But I’ve been asked many times if there’s a simple way to strip out all the accents, graves, etc. in T-SQL. These are called diacritics, and we’ve created a function to help you remove them if you decide you really must. (But as I said, really consider keeping them).
2021-01-07
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://sqldownunder.com/freestuff
Along with the normal updates to SQL Server versions and builds, we’ve added the following new functions:
2020-10-22
I often say that I love writing code that writes code. I use T-SQL to generate T-SQL scripts all the time. (I use Excel to do it too but that’s a story for another day). An issue I ran into a while back though, was how to output decimal numbers. I wanted to make sure I was using the correct decimal separator for the user who was running the script.
2020-06-03
The DatesBetweenNoWeekends function in our free SDU Tools for developers and DBAs, is really popular. It provides a range of dates between starting and ending dates, ignoring weekends.
DatesBetweenNoWeekends is a simple table-valued function that takes two parameters:
@StartDate - the first date to return @EndDate - the last date to return
The columns returned are:
DateNumber - a sequential number for the dates returned DateValue - the date
2020-05-20
The DateDimensionColumns function in our free SDU Tools for developers and DBAs, has been really popular. It provides the standard columns that are part of a typical date dimension in a data warehouse. But we’re especially proud of a new function that can be used to expand a date dimension with really useful additional information. We call it DateDimensionPeriodColumns.
The DateDimensionColumns function had the usual columns:
Date, Day Number, Day Name, Short Day Name, Month Name, Short Month Name, Month Number, Month Label, Year, Year Label, Day of Year, Fiscal Month Number, Fiscal Month Label, Fiscal Year, Fiscal Year Label, Day of Fiscal Year, ISO Week Number
2020-05-13
