Azure-Sql-Db

When writing emails or online text, it’s become common to see UPPER CASE TEXT AS A FORM OF SHOUTING.

Yet I see IT systems every day that still have text that humans are meant to read in all upper-case or all lower-case. Please don’t do that to your users.

But how do you fix text like that? We have a tool for that.

The SDU Tools collection has a ProperCase function and a TitleCase function that you can use in T-SQL and stop your SQL Server based applications from shouting at your users.

2017-12-01

I might be somewhat anal when it comes to database design. (Probably almost any type of coding). Perhaps it’s a mild form of  OCPD-behavior , but inconsistency frustrates me. (I’m told that OCPD is the correct term, and that people often apply OCD to that behavior incorrectly).

Worse, inconsistency leads to nasty, hard-to-find errors and your applications become more and more fragile.

If I’m holding an email address and I define it as 70 characters in one place, 100 in another, and 160 in yet another, I have the chance of random failures when I’m moving data around or assigning values from place to place. (For email addresses, I recently discussed why they should be 255 characters anyway).

2017-11-29

Everyone working with databases knows that having too many indexes can be a problem. Indexes need to be modified whenever the data in the associated tables need to be modified, so yes it can slow down data inserts, updates, and deletes.

How big a problem is too many indexes?

Overall, I’m not as concerned about this as many other people seem to be. I always want to focus on what the system is spending its time doing, and on most systems that I work on, that’s reading, not writing.

2017-11-24

This post covers another pair of useful functions that are part of the SDU Tools collection.

The first tool AsciiOnly deals with situations where you need to convert Unicode data (multi-byte data) to ASCII data (single byte). It processes each character and if it’s not in the ASCII range, it replaces the character with the value that you supply.  If your second parameter is an empty string, you’ll effectively strip out the non-ASCII characters, but your replacement can also be one or more characters.

2017-11-22

SQL Server 2012 added the function EOMONTH. It returns the end of the month. That’s useful but there are two things that bug me about it:

First: What’s with the name? Do we really have to save 3 characters from ENDOFMONTH, particularly when the same version added functions like DATETIMEOFFSETFROMPARTS? When I asked, I was told it was the name of the function in Excel. I can’t admit to being happy that SQL Server and T-SQL is following the naming of a function that someone added to Excel in the 1980’s in some adhoc way.

2017-11-17

There is a SQL Server T-SQL function that calculates the number of days (or months, or years, or other time periods) between any two dates.

SELECT DATEDIFF(day, 'firstdate', 'seconddate');

But I regularly get asked how to work out the number of days between two dates, excluding the weekends (Saturday and Sunday).

I’ve seen a few functions around that do a pretty good job at this but many don’t work properly if you have DATEFIRST changed in your session ie: if you change the first day of the week.

2017-11-15

Most of the time, we want SQL Server T-SQL queries to run as fast as possible, just the same as we want programs in any programming language to run as fast as possible.

But there are times when you want SQL Server to just sleep for a while, and without tying up system resources (like spinning around on the CPU).

Example of this would be waiting for new entries in Service Broker queues, or waiting to retry deadlocks.

2017-11-10

I love it when SQL Server gets brand new T-SQL language features.

SQL Server 2017 added a great new language feature called TRANSLATE. It’s been in some other products like Oracle for a while but it’s just been added to SQL Server.

Imagine I have a string like this:

’[02] 9992:2343’ 

But what I really want is one like this:

’(02) 9992-2343’

Up to SQL Server 2016, I could do this with a series of replace statements:

2017-11-08

Occasionally I run into a need to clear out all objects in a schema in a SQL Server database. Sometimes it’s because I want to remove the schema itself. It’s often painful to do as I have to find all the types of T-SQL objects, and then often have to remove them in a particular order.

So I added a tool to my SDU Tools collection to do just that.

2017-11-03

I recently shipped the latest update to my SDU Tools collection.

This time I decided to add a tool that’s in the “cute” category. It’s called InvertString and you can see it action in the image above.

Yes, it takes an input string and returns a string that looks quite like an upside down version of the same string.

As part of the inversion I also reversed the order of the string so when you look at it upside down, it still looks correct. But if what you really want is a mirror image, you could combine it with REVERSE to achieve that outcome:

2017-10-31