Technical Article

Calculating Percentage Change

To provide data analysis you may need to perform some basic trend analysis. For example, if you want to identify the percentage of change in the number of orders received from one month to the next. The challenge to providing that on the fly is the change can be either an increase or a decrease, […]

(1)

You rated this post out of 5. Change rating

2007-03-02 (first published: )

6,528 reads

Technical Article

Validating Canadian Postal Codes

For fellow Canadians and neighbours to the south, you may find useful a function to validate the formatting of a Canadian postal code.  More than once I've had to work with web programmers on checking that a postal code meets the A1A1A1 style, so carry around a function that simply returns a true/false bit if […]

You rated this post out of 5. Change rating

2007-01-15 (first published: )

1,083 reads

Technical Article

Formatting Dates

There are many ways to format dates, and rather that reinvent the wheel each time I've found it helpful to have a user defined function always available. As a function it of courses processes on each row, and to enable the most flexibility the formatting style is passed simply as a parameter. Year month and […]

You rated this post out of 5. Change rating

2005-08-31 (first published: )

477 reads

Technical Article

Automatically Restoring from Production

Came across a great script from Ken Kaufman on copying backups using xp_cmdshell.  Thought I'd contribute a script I wrote that builds on that to restore the latest production backup to a testing or development server.  In this case I routinely create all my production backups to a network share and then use that source […]

You rated this post out of 5. Change rating

2002-12-16

654 reads

Blogs

A New Word: on tenderhooks

By

on tenderhooks – adj. feeling the primal satisfaction of being needed by someone, which...

Ramblings about data communities and your contributions, no excuses

By

I have been active in the data community throughout my career. I have met...

SQL Server Journey till 2025 (brief)

By

Quick Summary for Microsoft SQL Server till 2025, I am fortunate to be part...

Read the latest Blogs

Forums

how do i map the "current" object entry in for each to one variable

By stan

hi, in an ssis  for each loop over an object variable called MyListVariable, i...

Simulating Mercury’s Orbital Motion Using Pure T-SQL (NASA 2025 Dataset)

By NKTgLaw

SQL Server is typically viewed as a transactional or analytical database engine. However, it...

Azure SQL Database | CREATE EVENT SESSION [Blocking_Capture] ON DATABASE

By DanielP

Hello, Is there a way in Azure SQL Database to change the 'Blocking Process...

Visit the forum

Question of the Day

String Similarity I

On SQL Server 2025, when I run this, what is returned?

SELECT EDIT_DISTANCE_SIMILARITY('SQL Server', 'MySQL')

See possible answers