Development

For this month’s T-SQL Tuesday, I asked y’all to write about the most recent ticket or issue that you closed. (If you want to see other peoples’ posts, you can check out the comments on that invite post, or wait til next week and I’ll publish a wrap-up of everyone’s answers.) A past client emailed…

The first time I saw FOR XML PATH being used to generate a comma-delimited list, I think I stared at it, shook my head to clear the cobwebs, stared at it some more, and then closed the code editor thinking it was complete witchcraft. And that same thing probably happened the next several times, too.…

To find out, let’s set up a simple status log table: DROP TABLE IF EXISTS dbo.StatusLog; CREATE TABLE dbo.StatusLog (TimeItHappened DATETIME2 PRIMARY KEY CLUSTERED, Step VARCHAR(20)); GO 123456 DROP TABLE IF EXISTS dbo.StatusLog; CREATE TABLE dbo.StatusLog     (TimeItHappened DATETIME2 PRIMARY KEY CLUSTERED,     Step VARCHAR(20));GO And then let’s try a two-part transaction: BEGIN TRAN INSERT INTO dbo.StatusLog VALUES…

Aaron Bertrand posted a challenge: We’re going to use the AdventureWorks sample database (get your copy here), where the folks in marketing requested a list of users to e-mail a new promotional campaign. The customers need to meet at least one of the following criteria: last placed an order more than a year ago placed…

Writing new code = bugging. That part’s easy. Taking those bugs back out, that’s the hard part. Developers are used to their tools having built-in ways to show what line of code is running now, output the current content of variables, echo back progress messages, etc. For a while, SQL Server Management Studio also had…

When someone says, “Find all the rows that have been deleted,” it’s a lot easier when the table has an Id/Identity column. Let’s take the Stack Overflow Users table: It has Ids -1, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 … but no 6 or 7. (Or 0.) If someone asks you to find all the Ids…