Category Archives: MS SQL

SQL Server HTML to Plain Text Function

This week, I had a requirement to convert some HTML text in a SQL column to plaintext and store that plaintext in a different database. I found this solution for html to text, but it’s using a WHILE loop and … Continue reading

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SQL Tricks – Remove Interior Spaces

This week, I was given a set of data to import to a database. After the import, I noticed that the source data had lots of unnecessary spaces all over the place. I can, of course get rid of leading … Continue reading

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Vigenere By SQL

After that previous post, I suppose it was natural for me to wonder what it would take to apply Vigenere cypher logic using T-SQL. I knew right off that the code would look much different. Mainly, because my self-imposed rule … Continue reading

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SQL For Fun: Parsing the iTunes XML

What happens if one part of your personality is data-parsing nerd and another part is music lover nerd? You end up trying to answer questions like, “Which songs did I have rated with 4 stars last year that are lower … Continue reading

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Using Tally Table to Remove Invalid XML Characters

A couple of weeks ago, I was called in to troubleshoot an error occurring in a SQL stored procedure. The procedure was selecting a variety of information out as XML data. The error occurred because on of the columns being … Continue reading

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Using SQL to Mege Three Incomplete Data Sets

You can join data sets. LEFT JOIN, RIGHT JOIN, even OUTER APPLY. There’s nothing to learn here. Last week, I had what seemed to be a simple join of three data sets. My permutation was a lot more complicated than … Continue reading

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Find DTS and FTP Job Steps From msdb

I started a new full-time contract this month, which is always weird. Not having a full understanding of the project, access rights roadblocks, and unfamiliarity with the code base all team up to make days feel long and unproductive. One … Continue reading

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Update Across Joined Tables in MySQL

I had to do a MySQL update on records that were retrieved from a two-table join today. I shouldn’t have been surprised to find that I needed a different syntax than I know from MS SQL, where I would write, … Continue reading

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Easy Foreign Key Drop and Restore for SQL Server

From time to time, we’ve all had a database query to run that was stymied by foreign key constraints. In my case, it was a request to restore a table’s values from one copy of the system to another. We … Continue reading

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Assigning Variables When No Row Exists

A SQL Server tidbit that I never knew before today. This was a test on SQL 2000. I’d be interest to know if you get the same result on something more current. [Update: still just like this on SQL 2008] … Continue reading

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