This week’s post is a requirement that I see very regularly as a developer. You get a plaintext string containing one or more ranges. Each range is comma delimited, and the start and end values of the range are separated by a dash. The string could look something like this, for example: 100-120,121-499,510,520,790-999.
Wouldn’t it be practical if we could construct a table value function that returns one row for each range, with columns for the start and end of each range?
I sometimes want to know how my data is spread across different partitions in a table or index – after all, this can affect performance and storage a great deal, and if the data is really badly skewed, most or all of it could be stuck in a single partition, rendering the partitioning scheme pretty much useless in the first place.
You can use dynamic management views to find out how your data is spread across different partitions, and how those partitions are delimited, in “plain english”. Here’s how!