The Bit Bucket

I showed earlier how we can retrieve data from a table using a SELECT clause. It can also be used to determine which columns are returned, and which table the data is being retrieved from. But we don’t always want all the rows to be returned. The WHERE clause fixes that.

It’s important to understand that the WHERE clause limits the rows returned to ones where the expression in the WHERE clause evaluates to a logical TRUE value.

2019-06-03

A while back I purchased a number of Audible titles, thinking I’d listen to them as I traveled around. I grabbed a number of ones related to presentation and I thought I’d also check out some general self-improvement titles.

What I didn’t realize, is although they had different titles, I’d basically bought a number of copies of essentially the same book, but with different titles. This was one of them.

2019-05-31

This is part 7 in a series of posts:

• Part 1 covered being sure there is a locking and blocking issue
• Part 2 covered the impact of RCSI
• Part 3 looked at the impacts of indexing on locking and blocking
• Part 4 looked at what deadlocks really are and how SQL Server handles them
• Part 5 looked at how applications should handle deadlocks
• Part 6 looked at how to avoid deadlocks in the first place

Today, though, I want to look at how to handle deadlocks if you must do that in T-SQL.

2019-05-30

I often need to document the access that various users have to content stored in SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS). Surprisingly, I didn’t find any built-in way to do that.

We had started to add some Reporting Services related options to our free SDU Tools for developers and DBAs, and, just for this, we added a new procedure RSListUserAccessToContent.

It takes two parameters:

@IsOrderedByUserName bit -> Is the output ordered by user (default yes else by item) @RSDatabaseName sysname -> Reporting Services DB name (default is ReportServer)

2019-05-29

In recent years, there’s an odd trend that I’ve been noticing. Adverbs seem to be getting replaced by adjectives, and at an increasingly fast rate. I see signs that say things like this:

Drive Safe

Now when I was at school, we’d have been given a hard time for writing that. We’d have been told in no uncertain terms that it should have been:

Drive Safely

I was trying to work out if it was more of a US-based thing. I see it far more often in US-based writing, yet it’s also happening in the UK, Australia, and others as well.

2019-05-28

Apart from data just in a table SQL server can select other things like the ones shown here:

If I say SELECT 2, it just returns the value 2.

If I say SELECT ‘Hello’, it just returns Hello.

Both of those are examples of what’s called a literal value, which is an exact value that doesn’t change.

SELECT 4 + 5 is an example of an expression. This is where we can work something out to get the value that needs to be returned. No surprise, that will return 9 just as you’d.

2019-05-27

When I’m writing SQL Server scripts, I often need to store the name of SQL Server objects (like databases, schemas, tables, procedures, etc.) in variables.

That can also happen when I’m creating tables. I might need to store a SQL Server object name (like a login name or a user name) in a column of a table.

So which data type should be used? varchar(100), varchar(200), nvarchar(max), etc. etc. ??

2019-05-24

This is part 6 in a series of posts:

• Part 1 covered being sure there is a locking and blocking issue
• Part 2 covered the impact of RCSI
• Part 3 looked at the impacts of indexing on locking and blocking
• Part 4 looked at what deadlocks really are and how SQL Server handles them
• Part 5 looked at how applications should handle deadlocks

Today, though, I want to look at how to try to avoid deadlocks in the first place.

2019-05-23

I write a lot of utility code for SQL Server. Many of the system tables include values for LoginTypeID and UserTypeID but I’ve never found a view in SQL Server that returns a description of each of those values.

To make it easy, in our free SDU Tools for developers and DBAs, we added two views (LoginTypes and UserTypes) to help.

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

2019-05-22

One of the things that I love about digital books and audio books is how quickly I can go from a friend talking about one, to actually having it. This book is one of those. I can’t actually remember who recommended this one but I recall looking it up immediately and purchasing it. It’s The Little Book of Luck by Richard Wiseman.

Wiseman is a professor for public understanding of psychology in the UK. He states his interests as “unusual areas including deception, luck, humour, and the paranormal”.

2019-05-21