The Bit Bucket

I work with a number of clients in a variety of industries. I’m constantly amazed by the larger companies that simply do everything they can to avoid paying for things that they should be paying for.

I’ll give you two simple examples.

Many companies use TeamViewer. It’s easy to use and it works well for what it’s intended for. However I’d say that over 90% of the clients are using it as the free personal edition that says all over it for non-commercial use. I don’t get why companies that are turning over tens of millions of dollars, or who are managing billions of dollars of other people’s funds struggle to pay the correct licensing for basic utilities that they depend upon.

2020-04-14

In upcoming blog posts, I’ll show you how to change from one data type to another. I’ll show you how to use CONVERT to output date/time values to string formats.

If you look at the web page for CAST and CONVERT, you’ll notice there are many styles for conversion. For example, the US format is called 101 if it has a 4 digit century. But it’s called 1 if you only have a 2 digit century. Another very common one is the British/French one and that’s 103 for a 4 digit century or just 3 for a 2 digit century.

2020-04-13

I just wanted to give everyone a heads-up that we recently shipped version 19 of our free SDU Tools for developers and DBAs to our SDU Insiders.

We’re pretty happy with this new version and it includes Azure SQL Database support as well as SQL Server.

So what’s changed?

Version 19 includes the following enhancements:

DatesBetweenNoWeekends - A new version of our DatesBetween function that excludes weekends InitialsFromName - Extracts someone’s initials from their name (with/without a separator) DateDimensionPeriodColumns - We’re really proud of this one. It completely enriches your date dimensions with period logic. I’d encourage you to watch the video for this one. StartOfYear, EndOfYear, StartOfWeek, EndOfWeek, StartOfWorkingWeek, EndOfWorkingWeek - more date calculations that do what their names suggest CurrentSessionDecimalSeparator - works out what the decimal separator is in your session CurrentSessionThousandsSeparator - does the name for the thousands separator StripDiacritics - Strips diacritics (accents, graves, unlauts, etc.) from a string DateTime2ToUnixTime, UnixTimeToDateTime2 - New functions for conversion to/from Unix times TimezoneOffsetToHours - Converts a timezone offset to a decimal number of hours

2020-04-12

Hi Folks,

We’ve just produce another new eBook that’s with our compliments, for anyone subscribed to our SDU Insiders list.

If you’ve wondered about implementing TDE and aren’t sure, this guide should help. If you’ve already implemented it and aren’t sure if you’ve done things right, again this should help.

The book also includes a frequently-asked questions section with questions we’ve commonly been asked by our clients.

You’ll find it here: http://tdebook.sqldownunder.com

2020-04-10

I’ve been seeing quite a lot of unnecessary dynamic SQL code lately, that’s related to ALTER DATABASE statements.  It was part of code that was being scripted.

Generally, the code looks something like this:

DECLARE @SQL nvarchar(max);

SET @SQL = N'ALTER DATABASE ' 
           + DB_NAME() 
           + ' SET COMPATIBILITY_LEVEL = 150;';

EXEC (@SQL);

(I’ve used setting a db_compat level as an example)

Or if it’s slightly more reliable code, it says this:

2020-04-09

I do quite a bit of online shopping. One thing that many sites have implemented, is an attempt to recapture your attention when you’ve added items to a shopping cart, and then abandoned the cart.

This is seen as a feature in many implementations of carts for online stores.

Manipulate them?

Given it’s so common now, I’ve also found that many can be manipulated. For example, one clothing store that I like, will send me a reminder about my abandoned cart one day later. Often at that point, they’ll make an additional offer, like free shipping.

2020-04-07

The datetimeoffset data type was added in SQL Server 2012 and allowed us to not only store date and time values, but to also store a time zone offset (from -14 hours to +14 hours). When you’re using this data type though, you might need to change a value from one time zone offset to another.  That’s the purpose of the SWITCHOFFSET function.

Look at the following query:

SYSDATETIMEOFFSET is being used to return the current date, time, and time zone offset for the server, but we’re also asking for the equivalent with a +7 time zone offset. (That was the current time in Seattle when the query was run). You can see the result here:

2020-04-06

Hi Folks,

Just a heads-up that we’ve just released SQL Down Under podcast show 79 with Microsoft Principal Program Manager Mark Brown.

Mark is an old friend and has been around Microsoft a long time. He is a Principal Program Manager on the Cosmos DB team. Mark is feature PM for the replication and consistency features. That includes  its multi-master capabilities, and its management capabilities. He leads a team focused on customers and community relations.

2020-04-04

A simple question came up on a forum the other day. The poster was trying to work out why he couldn’t find square brackets (i.e. [ ] ) using LIKE in T-SQL.

The trick is that to find the opening bracket, you need to enclose it in a pair of square brackets. But you can just find the closing one directly.

Let’s see an example. I’ll create a table and populate it:

2020-04-02

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