The Bit Bucket

I’ve seen a lot of people lately complaining about meeting burnout. It seems that in our pandemic-isolated world where staff members and others are available pretty much on call all day long, it’s become really common to have a much larger number of meetings than we used to.

I’m interested in why this is. Perhaps it’s the lack of contact leading to a desire for more contact and conversation, but if there were a lot of unproductive meetings before, nowadays that seems to have increased so much that it seems almost silly.

2020-06-02

In previous posts, I mentioned that you can easily extract the year, month, and day from dates and times, but you might want other components. That’s what the DATEPART() function does.

You can see the output from the query above here:

To use this function , we put the interval that we’re after and then the value we want to find it out from. So if you look at this one, I said I wanted the day from 28th of February 2019. The day is 28.

2020-06-01

I’m often working with developers who are migrating to SQL Server from Oracle. (Well, who can blame them?) One of the first questions that I’m often asked though, is where is the dual table?

In Oracle, a SELECT statement must have a FROM clause.

In SQL Server, this code will work fine:

SELECT UPPER('Hello');

It will just return the string converted to upper case. You can alias it as well:

SELECT UPPER('Hello') AS Greeting;

Again, you’ll get the converted string but the column will be called Greeting.

2020-05-29

Another question that I keep seeing on SQL Server forums is:

Why do my SQL Server backup files keep getting much larger?

The backup commands that the poster is using look like this:

BACKUP DATABASE @DatabaseName
    TO DISK = @BackupFile
    WITH COMPRESSION;

When you do a backup, what you’re actually doing is adding a backup set to a media set. Each time you do a backup like that, you’re adding another backup set to the same media set.

2020-05-28

I’ve found the sys.time_zone_info system view that was added in SQL Server 2016, really useful in a number of situations. It returns the name of each timezone, along with their current offset from UTC (like +01:00 or -07:00 ) and if they are or are not currently in daylight savings time.

However, what I’ve found myself needing to do is to convert the timezone offset part to a decimal number of hours.

2020-05-27

I work with many different clients and I see work that’s great and I also see work that’s not so great. But the work that frustrates me the most, is inconsistent work.

When we built a house a while back, there are a number of rooms that have a combination light switch like the one shown in the main image. One switch is for the light, one is for something else: most likely a fan in a bathroom, etc.

2020-05-26

When you’re writing T-SQL code, it’s also common to need to work out how far apart two dates are, or it could even be dates and times.

The DATEDIFF() function does that. In this case I’m asking how many days is it from 28th of February 2019 to 31st of July 2019?  The answer is:

So it says the difference is 153 days. Now we could have used any of those other intervals for that. I mentioned them before in this post.

2020-05-25

I used to be able to tell when someone moved from working with Access databases and arrived at SQL Server. What was the tell-tale sign?

All their tables had names like tblCustomers.

We’ve pretty much stopped people doing that, and we also have pretty much stamped out Hungarian Notation, at least in SQL Server.  We don’t use variable names like @intCreditRating, although there are still a number of people that I see clinging to Hungarian Notation when they work with SSIS, particularly in their .NET code. In their code, you’ll see values like strCustomerName and so on. The irony is that .NET developers long since moved past doing that, yet people writing .NET code in SSIS still do it.

2020-05-22

I answered a forum question the other day about how to list all the columns in a SQL Server database. That’s straightforward enough, but they also asked for all the extended properties for the column.

In case you need to do this, here’s some code:

SELECT s.[name] AS SchemaName,
       t.[name] AS TableName,
       c.[name] AS ColumnName,
       c.is_nullable AS IsNullable,
       typ.[name] AS DataTypeName,
       c.max_length AS MaximumLength,
       c.[precision] AS [Precision],
       c.scale AS Scale, 
       ep.ExtendedPropertyName,
       ep.ExtendedPropertyValue
FROM sys.columns AS c
INNER JOIN sys.tables AS t
ON t.object_id = c.object_id 
INNER JOIN sys.schemas AS s
ON s.schema_id = t.schema_id 
INNER JOIN sys.types AS typ
ON typ.system_type_id = c.system_type_id 
AND typ.user_type_id = c.user_type_id 
OUTER APPLY 
(
    SELECT ep.[name] AS ExtendedPropertyName,
           ep.[value] AS ExtendedPropertyValue
    FROM sys.extended_properties AS ep
    WHERE ep.major_id = c.object_id 
    AND ep.minor_id = c.column_id
) AS ep
WHERE t.is_ms_shipped = 0
AND t.[name] <> N'sysdiagrams'
ORDER BY SchemaName, TableName, ColumnName, ExtendedPropertyName;

How it works

I start with the sys.columns view and join it to sys.tables and sys.schemas, to get the schema and table name. The other reason is to make sure it’s not a Microsoft-supplied table. I also wanted to exclude the sysdiagrams table that is created when you first create a database diagram using SQL Server Management Studio. (Curiously, that one’s not flagged as a Microsoft-supplied table).

2020-05-21

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