All Articles - SQL Authority with Pinal Dave

SQL SERVER – How to do IF…THEN in SQL SERVER?

August 7, 2015

Just another day I received following question – “Pinal, I am from DotNet expertise and I do not know how to convert the logic of IF…THEN into SQL statement, would you please help? ~Rajesh” I love simple questions as they have simple answers. In SQL Server, we can use a…

SQL SERVER – A Stored Procedure for Executing SSIS Packages in the SSIS Catalog – Notes from the Field #092

August 6, 2015

Pinal Dave

SQL, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks

Notes from the Field, SQL Backup and Restore, SSIS

[Note from Pinal]: This is a new episode of Notes from the Field series. SQL Server Integration Service (SSIS) is one of the most key essential part of the entire Business Intelligence (BI) story. It is a platform for data integration and workflow applications. In this episode of the Notes from the…

SQL SERVER – Knowing Which Database is Consuming My Memory

August 5, 2015

Pinal Dave

SQL, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks

SQL DMV, SQL Memory

I have been fortunate enough to be at conferences around the world and it is always refreshing to see how people come up with some really common yet never answered questions from time to time. The classic questions I get asked ever since I started working with databases and SQL…

SQL SERVER – Unable to Start SQL – Error: SQL Server Could Not Spawn Lazy Writer Thread

August 4, 2015

Pinal Dave

SQL, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks

SQL Error Messages

I have a tendency to try out various settings on a typical SQL Server just to see how the behavior changes from time to time. While playing with affinity settings in SQL Server – I shot myself in the foot. It was interesting to reach how I came out of…

SQL SERVER – Increase Characters Displayed in Text Results

August 3, 2015

Pinal Dave

SQL, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks

SQL Server Management Studio

Working with various SQL Server options is always a great feeling. Every now and then I go to the Options page to get just the thing I want. When I wrote the blog post – SQL SERVER – Getting started and creating JSON using SQL Server 2016 I was expecting…

Interview Question of the Week #030 – Retrieve Last Inserted Identity of Record

August 2, 2015

Pinal Dave

SQL, SQL Interview Questions and Answers, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks

SQL Identity

Question: What are the different ways of retrieving the identity of last inserted record? Which method do you prefer? Answer: There are many different ways to do that. Here are three different ways to retrieve the identity of the last inserted record. I personally use SCOPE_IDENTITY () to return the identity…

SQL SERVER – How to Remove All Characters From a String Using T-SQL?

August 1, 2015

Pinal Dave

SQL, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks

SQL String

In the recent past I have seen the best interaction and learning happens when we all get into a puzzle and challenge mode. And that just gets the creative juice in our minds and some really innovative solutions are given. So this blog is written like a nice trivia solution…

SQL SERVER – Puzzle – Inside Working of Datatype smalldatetime

July 31, 2015

Pinal Dave

SQL, SQL Puzzle, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks

SQL DateTime

In the recent past, I have been bringing few puzzles around using date and time functions. All these have brought some awesome feedbacks and you all have been sharing some awesome answers. Today’s question comes from an unusual place wherein one of a developer said he was getting unexpected results…

SQL SERVER – DevOps for the DBA – Notes from the Field #091

July 30, 2015

Pinal Dave

SQL

Notes from the Field, SQL Server

[Note from Pinal]: This is a 91st episode of Notes from the Field series. Divas is a new buzz word with lots of substance behind it. Not everyone understands what it means and not everyone actually related it to their daily job. Lots of people think that it is alright to not explore and learn about this as after a few days or months it will be meaningless. However, the reality seems very different about DevOps as it is one of the concepts which is just rediscovered. I recently asked my friend Stuart about what it means by DevOps for DBA and he had a informative answer to this question.

SQL SERVER – Error: Msg 245 – Conversion failed when converting the varchar value ‘Inactive’ to data type int

July 29, 2015

Pinal Dave

SQL, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks

SQL Error Messages

Using CASE statements is something I see a lot of developers use. They use it in complex environments and I have been fortunate to troubleshoot and look at code blocks that run for pages using the standard CASE statements. This blog post is inspired by one such errors using CASE…