The Bit Bucket

In some countries, post office boxes are quite anonymous. And for that reason, some vendors aren’t keen to send goods to PO Boxes. But that’s not all countries. In Australia, for example, you have to provide all sorts of ID to the post office to be able to get one.

Why PO Boxes?

The fundamental reason that many people use PO Boxes is to have a relatively safe location for their mail to be collected. At so many houses, letter boxes are quite unsafe. And for people living in apartments, the situation is often far, far worse.

2020-05-19

When you’re writing T-SQL, you might also need to add intervals to dates, perhaps add days or subtract days and so on. The DATEADD() function is the one that we can add or subtract intervals to the date and time.

Now in the example shown here, what I’ve said is in 20190228 or  28th of February 2019. I want to add on 12 days. To subtract 12 days, I would have just put -12 instead of 12. You can see the output here:

2020-05-18

I keep hearing questions from developers about the difference between SQL Server Express Edition and LocalDB. One asked me the other day:

What’s the difference between connecting to .\SQLEXPRESS and (localdb)\v11.0 ?

SQL Express (it’s really SQL Server Express Edition) is a service-based version of SQL Server i.e. it runs as a service all the time, independently of other applications. When you say .\SQLEXPRESS you are looking for a named instance of SQL Server called “SQLEXPRESS” that is on your local machine and connected to via a shared memory interface (that’s what the dot is).

2020-05-15

Several times now on forums, I’ve seen questions about Change Data Capture (CDC). People like the way they can retrieve details about changes that have occurred (often to trickle-feed into a data warehouse), but they are puzzled why CDC doesn’t tell them when the event occurred. There’s an easy fix for that.

Let’s start by doing a quick CDC setup:

DROP DATABASE IF EXISTS CDC;
GO

CREATE DATABASE CDC;
GO

USE CDC;
GO

CREATE TABLE dbo.NewEmployees
( 
    NewEmployeeID int IDENTITY(1,1) PRIMARY KEY CLUSTERED,
    FullName nvarchar(100)
);
GO

-- note new last few columns in:

SELECT * FROM sys.databases WHERE name = N'CDC';

-- enable cdc at the database level

EXEC sys.sp_cdc_enable_db;

-- enable cdc for the table - requires SQL Agent running

EXEC sys.sp_cdc_enable_table
  @source_schema = 'dbo',
  @source_name = 'NewEmployees',
  @supports_net_changes = 1,
  @role_name = NULL;

-- review the state of CDC

SELECT name, is_tracked_by_cdc FROM sys.tables;
GO

And let’s then add three rows of data, then change one of them:

2020-05-14

The DateDimensionColumns function in our free SDU Tools for developers and DBAs, has been really popular. It provides the standard columns that are part of a typical date dimension in a data warehouse. But we’re especially proud of a new function that can be used to expand a date dimension with really useful additional information. We call it DateDimensionPeriodColumns.

The DateDimensionColumns function had the usual columns:

Date, Day Number, Day Name, Short Day Name, Month Name, Short Month Name, Month Number, Month Label, Year, Year Label, Day of Year, Fiscal Month Number, Fiscal Month Label, Fiscal Year, Fiscal Year Label, Day of Fiscal Year, ISO Week Number

2020-05-13

Most websites that I visit have a link at the bottom of the page that suggests that you can use it to contact either the website team or the company that owns the site. (Might not be the same people) Based on years of trying, my expectation of ever getting a response from using one of these links is close to zero.

If you have a website that has a contact link, does it lead anywhere sensible?

2020-05-12

When you’re writing T-SQL code, it’s really common to need to extract components of a date, and the most common need is for year, month, and day. So T-SQL has separate functions just for that.

You can see the output from this query here:

The YEAR(), MONTH(), and DAY() functions take a date (or datetime, datetime2, smalldatetime) as input and return an integer for the year, month, or day.

2020-05-11

I’ve seen questions on the forums asking about where localdb stores its database files. Often, the question is about how to stop them going into the C:\Users folder. Clearly, that doesn’t seem to be a good spot for them.

localdb stores database files in the C:\Users area by default as it’s trying to find a location that the current user will have permission to write to. While I understand the rationale, that’s not where most users will want those files.

2020-05-08

There’s a question that I hear all the time in SQL Server forums:

Why didn’t the transaction roll back when a primary key violation occurred?

Take a look at the code in the main image above. Would you expect it to execute the second and third INSERTs if the first INSERT failed with a primary key violation? So many people would. If you’re one of them, read on.

By default, that’s not how SQL Server works.

2020-05-07

I recently came across a requirement to extract someone’s initials from within their name. That was a new one for me, so we added a new function into our free SDU Tools for developers and DBAs. It’s called InitialsFromName.

It’s a straightforward scalar function that takes two parameters:

@Name nvarchar(max) is the name to extract the initials from

@Separator nvarchar(max) is a separator placed between the returned initials.  (Make it an empty string for none)

2020-05-06