SQL Tips and Tricks Archives - Page 122 of 536 - SQL Authority with Pinal Dave

SQL SERVER – Increase Characters Displayed in Text Results

August 3, 2015

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 – 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…

SQL SERVER – Inserting into Sparse Column Sets and Errors Associated With It

July 27, 2015

Pinal Dave

SQL, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks

SPARSE Columns, SQL Scripts

I have written tons of blogs in the past around using sparse columns. The best part and lesser known part of sparse columns is that we can write to the column sets directly too. In this blog let me take a tour of how this can be achieved. When sparse…

Interview Question of the Week #029 – Difference Between CHARINDEX vs PATINDEX

July 26, 2015

Pinal Dave

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

Question: What is the difference between CHARINDEX vs PATINDEX? Answer: We can use either CHARINDEX or PATINDEX to search in a TEXT field in SQL SERVER. The CHARINDEX and PATINDEX functions return the starting position of a pattern you specify. Both functions take two arguments. With PATINDEX, you must include percent signs before and…