Sql-Server

I was answering a question on a forum the other day, and the person asking the question was puzzled about how to send an email to an operator (i.e. msdb operator) rather than to just any other email address.

The reason he wanted to do that was that he wanted to use the Agent operator system to define a name. He didn’t want to hard-code a recipient name in his code. By having it as an operator, it could be changed later, independent of the code.

2019-11-14

We’ve got a lot of very useful string-related functions in SDU Tools. This is another one. At times, there’s a need to remove excess spaces between words in strings. In our free SDU Tools for developers and DBAs, we added a function to do just that: SingleSpaceWords.

The function just takes one parameter: the string to be processed.

Find out more

You can see it in action in the main image above, and in the video here:

2019-11-13

I spend quite a bit of each year working with spatial data (i.e. mostly mapping data but sometimes other data). One of the constant challenges is where to find the spatial data. Another challenge is where to find services that can help you to work with the data.

For Australian data, if you haven’t considered Mappify.io, I think you should take a look.

You need to create an account before you start but it’s free to create an account to try it out. Then there are a number of services.

2019-11-12

Joining together strings is called concatenating strings. In the first example here you can see SELECT hello, plus NULL, plus there. Now the trick with this, though, is that NULL is a bit of a challenge.

Note that the outcome of that first select statement is NULL is just NULL. As soon as you concatenate something with NULL, you would end up with NULL as the overall answer.

2019-11-11

If you want to learn a lot about how Snowflake works internally, it’s worth spending some time reading the ACM whitepaper that described the service.

It describes the overall structure of the service, and then describes how data is stored, followed by a description of how the encryption of the data within the service is accomplished. (I’ll talk more about the management of encryption keys in a later blog post).

2019-11-08

Another question that I recently saw on Stack Overflow was asking how you SELECT a bunch of transactions back past a cutoff date, add them up, INSERT a roll-up row, and then delete the old ones. The concern was with how you make sure the ones you are deleting are the same rows that you are rolling up (or totalling). Someone else might UPDATE or INSERT a row at the same time.

2019-11-07

More and more users of SDU Tools are adding the deployment of the tools into their standard deployment pipelines, and into their standard operating environments (SOEs).

One common but simple request that we’ve had is that they need to be able to check which version of SDU Tools is currently installed. So we added a function to do that.

It doesn’t take any parameters but just returns the version number as a string.

2019-11-06

Another important concept when you’re working with strings is the concept of Collations. If I write code like the first line here:

The question is how would I know if a capital A is treated the same as a lower case A. The answer to that is “it depends upon the collation”. Collations are sets of rules that determine how strings are compared. SQL Server supports lots of collations. You can see them all by executing:

2019-11-04

Similar to SQL Server, Snowflake has ways of creating programmable objects. But the way they work, and the way they are created is quite different.

Functions

Functions are the most similar. You can create them in two ways:

• Javascript
• T-SQL

I like the idea that you can choose which language to write code in, and that they both end up extending the Snowflake SQL language pretty much the same. Some code is better written in T-SQL and other code is better written in a higher-level language.

2019-11-01

In Stack Overflow, I saw a poster with a query like this:

select * from student where stud_id in (
'5',
'3',
'4'
)

And he was frustrated that he couldn’t reliably get an ordered output like this:

id|   name  |
5 |  John   |
3 |  Erik   |
4 | Michael |

The problem is that he was assuming that the IN clause had a specified order that was then obeyed by the SELECT statement.

2019-10-31