For years, String or binary data would be truncated never told us which column was too long. Now SQL Server does, and here is how to identify the column responsible.
How to Limit Output of Varchar(max), Nvarchar(max) in SELECT Statement? – Interview Question of the Week #218
How do you limit the output of Varchar(max) or Nvarchar(max) in a SELECT statement? A simple trick does it, and it works for varbinary(max), text and ntext too.
How to Extract Alphanumeric Only From A String? – Interview Question of the Week #214
A reader wanted only the values that mix letters and numbers from a column. Here is how to extract alphanumeric values from a string with simple pattern matching.
PostgreSQL – Storing Unicode Characters is Easy
SQL Server needs NVARCHAR or NCHAR for non-English text. In PostgreSQL, plain VARCHAR stores Unicode characters too, as my quick Russian example shows.
How to Sort a Varchar Column Storing Integers with Order By? – Interview Question of the Week #206
How do you sort a Varchar column storing integers with Order By when you cannot change the datatype? Here are two simple solutions I shared with a developer.
How to Trim TIME Part in DATETIME Values? – Interview Question of the Week #200
How to trim TIME part in DATETIME values? A reader wanted to keep only the date and the hour, so here are ways to cut off the minutes and seconds.
Alphabets – SQL SERVER – Retrieving Rows With All Alphabets From Alphanumeric Data
I got an email from one of my blog readers asking for an easy way to identify if a given string contains only alphabets. There can be methods.




