World of Whatever

Formatting a date in SQL Server with the Z indicator It seems so easy, I was building json in SQL Server and the date format for the API sp...

Counting a character in a column I ran into an issue today that I wanted to write about so that maybe I remember the solution. We ran into ...

Generating characters in TSQL I had to do a thing * and it involved generating "codes" as numbers were too hard for people. So,...

SQL Server Agent Job Sort Order Today's post could also be titled "I have no idea what is happening here." We have an agent j...

Polling in SQL Agent A fun question over on StackOverflow asked about using SQL Agent with SSIS to poll for a file's existence. As th...

A date dimension for SQL Server The most common table you will find in a data warehouse will be the date dimension. There is no "right...

Sort SQL Server Tables into similarly sized buckets You need to do something to all of the tables in SQL Server. That something can be any...

It's amazing the things I've run into with SQL Server this week that I never noticed. In today's pop quiz, let's look at R...

Altering table types - a compatibility guide In yesterday's post , I altered a table type. Pray I don't alter them further. What e...

Pop quiz Given the following DDL CREATE TABLE dbo.IntToTime ( CREATE_TIME int ); What will be the result of issuing the following c...

What are all the functions and their parameters? File this one under: I wrote it once, may I never need it again In my ever expanding quest...

Staging metadata framework for the unknown That's a terrible title but it's the best I got. A client would like to report out of Se...

What's my transaction isolation level That's an easy question to answer - StackOverflow has a fine answer. But, what if I use sp_...

Temporal table maker This post is another in the continuing theme of "making things consistent." We were voluntold to help anothe...

Broken View Finder Shh, shhhhhh, we're being very very quiet, we're hunting broken views. Recently, we were asked to migrate some c...

It's a pop quiz kind of day: run the code through your mental parser. BEGIN TRY DECLARE @foo varchar (30) = 'Created in t...

UNION removes duplicates When you need to combine two sets of data together, we use the UNION operator. That comes in two flavors: UNION a...

I'm working on a client where they have different business rules based on the day data is processed. On Monday, they generate a test bal...

I've built out this sort of thing a few times but in fine fashion, I've never saved my script. In a proper data warehouse, there wo...

When you create a view in SSMS using the wizard, it retains information for the layout designer. There's no need for this, especially as...