Business-Intelligence

It’s likely that everyone who uses SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) knows how to tell how long a query ran for. You can see it in the bottom right of the status bar when a query finishes. But one question that often comes up with a long-running query is when did my query finish? That’s not in the status bar and many people don’t seem to be aware that you can find it out.

2018-01-25

Today’s post is about one of our free SDU Tools that helps you with what you’d think would be a simple task in T-SQL but isn’t. TrimWhitespace is used to remove leading and trailing whitespace characters in T-SQL strings. As well as spaces, it will remove carriage returns, linefeeds, and tabs. You can see its action in the image above. You can also see it in action here: For more information on our free SDU Tools for SQL Server developers and DBAs, follow this link:

2018-01-24

Case sensitivity in comparisons is an aspect of computing that I’m surprised is still so widespread. I can’t say it more clearly than this: It’s a pox on computing and needs to be eradicated. I’ve recently been working at a site where a new case-sensitive SQL Server system is being implemented. I cannot begin to describe what a poor idea I think this is. In the end, all that a case sensitive system allows you to do is:

2018-01-23

In short: YES (In contradiction to Betteridge’s Law of Headlines) Every now and then, customers ask me if they really need to run DBCC CHECKDB. There was even a question that came up about this on a private mailing list full of people who really should already understand why. There is no mystery here. DBCC CHECKDB checks the database for physical readability (are the pages intact and can they be read from the I/O system).

2018-01-22

Ever since I started working with SQL Server back in 1992, the #1 requested feature that I kept hearing about was a separate date data type. SQL Server had a smalldatetime and a datetime but these included both date and time within the same type. Having date and time often led to odd bugs or performance issues, where people didn’t realize that times were included and tried to work with the values as dates.

2018-01-17

Many database developers (and other developers) seem to regard the endless use of abbreviations as some badge of honor. Don’t be one of these people. Avoid abbreviations almost all the time. I’ve written before about my dislike for the EOMONTH T-SQL statement. Given the same version introduced names like DATETIMEOFFSETFROMPARTS, surely we didn’t have to save 3 characters and could have had ENDOFMONTH. (I heard it was named this way to match the Excel function but matching something from another language that was created a long time ago isn’t the right answer here).

2018-01-16

When I’m looking at a database schema for the first time, there are a number of tell-tale signs that give me the hint that the developers really haven’t done much work with SQL Server before. They’ve made a “newbie” mistake. One of those is the extensive use of the float data type. Most times that I see this, the developers have come from a C or Java background and they assume that something that needs a decimal point in it, needs to be float.

2018-01-15

When I first start to work with a database that I haven’t seen before, one of the things that I check immediately is the type of data being stored. The list of existing data types often gives me interesting insights into the design of the database, and how it interacts with application code. The list of data types also shows me details of the consistency (or lack of) in the design.

2018-01-10

I see so much written about how to scale SQL Server systems, and this generally starts with needing to improve SQL Server database performance. When I read articles from the SQL Server field support teams with titles like Top 10 Performance Problems for SQL Server, I often just smile. The problem is one of perspective. If you are looking at the performance problems that are brought to the support teams to solve, you get a very, very skewed view of what’s typical.

2018-01-08

Is 2018 be a leap year? Was 2000 a leap year? Will 2100 be a leap year? When I was a young student at school, we learned that leap years were every four years. Then as I got older, I learned that there was more to it than that. It’s important to understand that any calendar is just an approximation, and there is a lot more to calendars than most people realize.

2018-01-03