I came upon this issue when I was building some views to support legacy integrations to an app that I was refactoring. The view is supposed to have exactly the same column definitions as a table in the old database that I am redesigning, so to make SSIS packages and other integrations run smoothly, I want the view’s columns to have the same datatypes, nullability, etc.
But there are some gotchas to watch out for with CAST and CONVERT.
Continue readingYou may think that speaking at usergroups and conferences is reserved for a select group of elite professionals. Let me tell you right away that this is not the case, and that you should seriously consider a rewarding side career as a speaker at usergroups and conferences!
Here’s the why and the how.
Typically, the advice on fill factor is “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”. But occasionally, you’ll find a database or even a server with a crazy default setting that just fills your disk and buffer pool without any real benefit. Here’s a nifty script to rebuild any tables and indexes to a fill factor of 100%.
Here are 50 random numbers:
--- 50 random numbers WITH cte AS ( SELECT 0 AS i, 100000.*POWER(RAND(CHECKSUM(NEWID())), 3) AS n UNION ALL SELECT i+1, 100000.*POWER(RAND(CHECKSUM(NEWID())), 3) FROM cte WHERE i<50) SELECT * FROM cte;
And in SSMS, with the variable-width default font, the output looks… slightly-less-than-readable in the grid view:
We could use STR() to format the output, but the indent looks a little off:
--- 50 random numbers WITH cte AS ( SELECT 0 AS i, 100000.*POWER(RAND(CHECKSUM(NEWID())), 3) AS n UNION ALL SELECT i+1, 100000.*POWER(RAND(CHECKSUM(NEWID())), 3) FROM cte WHERE i<50) SELECT *, STR(n, 12, 2) AS with_str FROM cte;
Here’s something I’ve found: the space character is roughly about half the width of a typical number character. So replace every leading space with two spaces, and it will look really neat in the grid:
--- 50 random numbers
WITH cte AS (
SELECT 0 AS i, 100000.*POWER(RAND(CHECKSUM(NEWID())), 3) AS n
UNION ALL
SELECT i+1, 100000.*POWER(RAND(CHECKSUM(NEWID())), 3)
FROM cte WHERE i<50)
SELECT *, STR(n, 12, 2) AS with_str,
REPLACE(STR(n, 12, 2), ' ', ' ') AS with_replace
FROM cte;
(and terrible everywhere else, obviously.)
Download and print this nifty little PDF with all of the INNER, LEFT, RIGHT, FULL and CROSS JOINs visualized! It’ll look great on your office wall or cubicle. Your coworkers and your interior decorator will love you for it.
How it works: For each join example, there are two tables, the left and the right table, shown as two columns. For the sake of simplicity, these tables are called “a” and “b” respectively in the code.
You’ll notice that the sheet uses a kind of pseudo-code when it comes to table names and column names.
Inspired by an actual customer scenario: what if you have a legacy app that doesn’t schema-prefix its database objects, but you want it to work with a specific assigned schema? There’s a quick and easy solution.
You’ll find a lot of people, consultants and peers, liberally dispensing plenty of “best practices” on the Interwebs and in real life. Heck, I’d say that’s pretty much all I do on this blog. But when should you go with the best practice and when should you make your own road?
This past Friday, I had the great privilege of speaking at the on-line Group By conference. Group By is a community-driven conference where anyone can submit an abstract. Site visitors will then rate sessions as well as help you build and improve your abstract.
My presentation was about various tips and tricks in SQL Server Management Studio, some of which I’ve already covered in previous articles on this blog.
The binary datatype of SQL Server is one of those features most developers don’t really use that often, but it turns out there’s more to binary values than just storing large, non-relational blobs.
I frequently need to look up object definitions when I’m developing or query tuning. You could use Object Explorer in SSMS, but that takes a lot of time and clicking. Then there’s the Alt+F1 shortcut, which will trigger the sp_help stored procedure. That however, comes with a lot of annoying built-in limitations, so a few years ago I started building and maintaining a “better Alt+F1” of sorts.
I decided to call it “Ctrl+3“. But I suppose you could assign it to any keyboard shortcut you want.
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