Azure-Sql-Db

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://sdutools.sqldownunder.com

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

Find out more

You can see it in action in the main image above, and in the video here. The full current version of the code is also shown below:

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

I recently came across a requirement to extract someone’s initials from within their name. That was a new one for me, so we added a new function into our free SDU Tools for developers and DBAs. It’s called InitialsFromName.

It’s a straightforward scalar function that takes two parameters:

@Name nvarchar(max) is the name to extract the initials from

@Separator nvarchar(max) is a separator placed between the returned initials.  (Make it an empty string for none)

2020-05-06

I mentioned in my last two SDU_Tools posts that I get really good feedback all the time from users of our free SDU Tools for developers and DBAs, but none more than when we have more and more date and time functions. Yet another pair of functions that we added in v19 that was recently shipped was StartOfYear and EndOfYear.

We had feedback that even though we had StartOfFinancialYear and EndOfFinancialYear, we didn’t have just StartOfYear and EndOfYear. So we’ve fixed that. These are simple scalar functions that take a single date parameter, and return the date for the start of the calendar year and the end of the calendar year that contain the date provided.

2020-04-29

I mentioned in my last SDU_Tools post that I get really good feedback all the time from users of our free SDU Tools for developers and DBAs, but none more than when we have more and more date and time functions. Another pair of functions that we added in v19 that was recently shipped was StartOfWorkingWeek and EndOfWorkingWeek.

These are simple scalar functions that take a single date parameter, and return the date for the Monday and the Friday of the week that contains the date provided.

2020-04-22

I get really good feedback all the time from users of our free SDU Tools for developers and DBAs, but none more than when we have more and more date and time functions. One pair of functions that we added in v19 that was recently shipped was StartOfWeek and EndOfWeek.

These are simple scalar functions that take a single date parameter, and return the date for the start and end of the week that contains the date provided.

2020-04-15

I like to have my databases at the same database compatibility level as the server, whenever possible. But how do you know the maximum value that’s allowed? We recently added a tool to our free SDU Tools for developers and DBAs to solve this. It’s called ServerMaximumDBCompatibilityLevel.

It’s a simple scalar function that returns the maximum DB compatibility level that’s supported by the server. It takes no parameters.

If you want to know which server version (like 2017 or 2019) that the DB compatibility level represents, you can also combine it with our SQLServerVersionForCompatibilityLevel function.

2020-04-01