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Set based splitting of delimited strings to columns

I recently presented on using CLR in SQL at DevWeek and commented on how TSQL Udfs just don't perform. A common scenario people in the audience were using TSQL Udfs for was splitting delimited strings. One guy asked me afterwards what the best way to do it was, he had addresses in one field he wanted...

Posted to SimonS Blog on SQL Server Stuff (Weblog) by simonsabin on 03-17-2008
SQL Server 2008 - Whats this abut 30,000 columns?

Its all about Sparse columns and they are a great feature of Katmai Imagine you have a products table, you will have attributes for some products that don't apply to others i.e. cup size applies to bras but not to socks. There are a number of ways of modelling this each with downsides. With sparse...

Posted to SimonS Blog on SQL Server Stuff (Weblog) by simonsabin on 03-16-2008
TSQL to change collation of database, whats new in SQL 2008 then?

How can you change collation of a database? How do you check the existing collation setup on a database & tables? By using the below TSQL: --For database select databasepropertyex(db_name(),'collation') as collation_name go --Tables select column_name, collation_name from INFORMATION_SCHEMA.COLUMNS...

Posted to SQL Server Knowledge Sharing Network (SqlServer-qa.net) (Weblog) by ssqa.net on 03-12-2008
SQL Server 2008 - Converting binary(hex) values to strings

One of the frequently asked questions in the newsgroups is how do you convert a string representation of a binary value to the equivalent binary value and the reverse. The latter is often required to be able to print out the binary representation. There have been a few undocumented functions and many...

Posted to SimonS Blog on SQL Server Stuff (Weblog) by simonsabin on 03-11-2008
SQL Server scrollable server cursors, use them carefully!

One sentence, if you haven't used the Cursors sensibly then database performance will be cursed! This is for newbie users and DBAs to be aware that on general recommendation is server side cursors are better than client side one, in this you need to be careful using the scrollable API server cursor methods...

Posted to SQL Server Knowledge Sharing Network (SqlServer-qa.net) (Weblog) by ssqa.net on 03-10-2008
SQL Server 2008 - ISDATE doesn't work with

I really don't understand this. The ISDATE function doesn't work with new date and time types, whats more you can't pass it a string representing a date before 1/1/1753. Try this select ISDATE('1/1/1700') in SQL 2008 it will return 0. Whats odd is that there is no function to cater...

Posted to SimonS Blog on SQL Server Stuff (Weblog) by simonsabin on 03-05-2008
The problem with local variables

Have you ever been writing a query and just cannot get it to use the right index? This could be one of the reasons why. Let's use this query with local variables as our example. declare @Start datetime declare @End datetime select @Start = '2004-08-01 00:00:00.000' select @End = '2004-07-28 00:00:00...

Posted to Jason Massie's SQL blog (Weblog) by JasonMassie on 01-25-2008
SQL Server 2008 Plan Guides from Cache

Uhoh... I can see some junior developers going crazy with this. One of the things that kept plan guides from being over used was the fact that they are kind of hard :) Well, Microsoft built their empire making hard stuff easy. They do it again with sp_create_plan_guide_from_cache. Let's look at this...

Posted to Jason Massie's SQL blog (Weblog) by JasonMassie on 01-18-2008
SQL Server 2008 - Batch inserts and identity columns using MERGE

Performing bulk inserts into a table when the table has an identity column has long bee a difficult challenge for client programming. The difficulty has been getting the identity values that have been generated for the set of data you are saving. It becomes even more difficult when you want to save parent...

Posted to SimonS Blog on SQL Server Stuff (Weblog) by simonsabin on 12-31-2007
Katmai Spatial - First thoughts

I've been doing some work with the Spatial types in Katmai and these are my first thoughts. The first thing is that the data type is the same used by SQL as used in your .Net code. So what does that mean, · You use the same methods, which is great from a familiarity perspective · When calling the...

Posted to SimonS Blog on SQL Server Stuff (Weblog) by simonsabin on 12-09-2007

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