Browse by Tags

First things first - a few words on Microsoft undocumented procedures (and tools): it is this simple - USE THEM WITH CAUTION. There are several out there, and they are all great. If you compare sp_who (documented) with sp_who2 (UN-documented) you will see the advantages. In the case of sp_MSForEachDB (UN-documented), there are several warnings I would like to bring to your attention: 1. Do not abuse it, since it is a global cursor. 2. UN-documented means that if something goes wrong, you will not...

Sometimes, it is necessary to update a field in one table, with information from another table. In this article, I will go over with you a few different methods for doing this. At the bottom there is a link to download the entire SQL script used in this post. The first thing that we will do is create a few temporary tables to test with. We will be loading these temporary tables, intentionally leaving the count columns in the #Employers table NULL because after each update we will set them back to...

Often times, people want to change the format of a datetime value returned from SQL Server. There are some things that you need to consider before doing this. The first thing that you need to be aware of is that SQL Server stores DATETIME values in an 8 byte value in the database, not as a string. So changing the display format will change your DATETIME into a VARCHAR The SMALLDATETIME datatype is stored in a 4 byte value. SQL Server 2008 introduces several new date datatypes including DATETIME2...