wetmatter nonsense

As you may have heard SQL Saturday Phoenix is underway. We are aiming for an end of July time frame and are in need of the community's involvement. We need presenters, sponsors and volunteers. All is open to suggestions so please, PLEASE voice your opinion and participate. 

If you are interested in supporting SQL Saturday Phoenix please signup using the appropriate form below. Please pass this information on.

• Presenters Signup form
• Sponsors Signup form
• Volunteers Signup form
• Suggestions form

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This is a quick vid that steps you through the process of creating a database snapshot, restoring a database from a snapshot and dropping a snapshot. I typically use snapshot while I am in a testing mode. I quickly create a snapshot and make all my modifications, run through my test and blow it all away by restoring from my recent snapshot. It is very useful and I use it often on my local development instances. Hopefully you will find it just as useful.

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Is SQL Saturday really coming to Phoenix? Well the announcement was made public at the Arizona PASS chapter in a recent user group meeting. It is currently being lead by @Hafthor, @Coneybeer and myself @sqlsamson. We have teamed up and are looking to get the community involved! If you don't know what SQL Saturday is then allow me to brief you on it. It is a one day FREE training event that is conveniently held on a Saturday. In these troubled times FREE training never sounded so good! How great is that? SQL Saturday offers two tracks with four to six sessions for each track lasting about an hour each. The best part is that the speakers are fellow SQL Server enthusiast from our very own local community. You know them and you love them so come out and show your support!

If you are familiar with SQL Saturday then you know it was picked up by (PASS) the Professional Association of SQL Server not long ago and the fact it is in its planning stages here in Arizona is exciting. With such a large and overwhelming amount of knowledge sharing that SQL Saturday has to offer, it will be to valuable asset to the community. Keep in mind that SQL Saturday won't be a success unless you get involved. We need support from the community in several different areas. If you are apart of another technical group please spread the word that SQL Saturday is coming and we are looking for speakers/presenters, sponsors, volunteers, and of course venues.

If you are willing to present, sponsor, volunteer or can assist with getting locations please contact either one of the following:

• Samson Loo: @sqlsamson - sqlsamson [at] gmail.com
• Chris Coneybeer @coneybeer
• Hafthor Stefansson @hafthor

For more information about SQL Saturday please visit SQLSaturday.com. I hope to hear from you and more importantly I hope to see you there!!!!

For information about the Arizona PASS chapter please visit Arizona PASS

-- samson

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This video steps you through the installation process of installing
SQL Server 2000 very quickly and very straightforward. This video is
one part of a series that goes through the upgrade process from 2000
to 2005 and on to 2008.

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Recently I faced a problem with a mobile device (subscriber) which had a suspect database. I tried running the following command to check the database:

 DBCC CHECKDB ('databasename') 

 EXEC sp_resetstatus 'yourDBname';
 ALTER DATABASE yourDBname SET EMERGENCY
 DBCC checkdb('yourDBname')
 ALTER DATABASE yourDBname SET SINGLE_USER WITH ROLLBACK IMMEDIATE
 DBCC CheckDB ('yourDBname', REPAIR_ALLOW_DATA_LOSS)
 ALTER DATABASE yourDBname SET MULTI_USER 

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Typically in most cases you find yourself removing leading zeros but in this case I needed to add leading zeros to a column. 

Remove Leading Zeros

 SELECT CAST(CAST(ColumnName AS INT) AS VARCHAR(10)) FROM TableName

Let's Pad the field

Since I needed 6 chars this will add 3 spaces to the front of the numbers

 SELECT STR(ColumnName, 6) FROM TableName 

Add Leading Zeros

Let's say we need to add zeros to an employee id, well this would be an easy way to accomplish it. First we pad it with spaces and replace those spaces with zeros.

 SELECT REPLACE(STR(ColumnName, 6), SPACE(1), '0') FROM TableName 

SELECT SalesPersonID 
       ,REPLACE(STR(SalesPersonID, 6), SPACE(1), '0') AS PaddedSalesPID  
FROM   Sales.SalesPerson

Note: the SPACE(1) is equivalent to ' ' (That is a Tick Space Tick) So two Ticks with a space in between)

Update Table

UPDATE Sales.SalesPerson 
SET newSalesPID = REPLACE(STR(SalesPersonID, 6), SPACE(1), '0')

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Typically you would use a JOIN clause when querying from multiple tables, but no one said you have to. Say for example you wanted to query two tables (tableA & tableB) which did not have any relationship (no one-to-one at all), yet there are fields in which would permit a comparison. Say street number, pre-direction, street name and the suffix.

Well you would compare
(tableA.street number = tableB.street number) and
(tableA.pre-direction = tableB.pre-direction) and
(tableA.street name = tableB.street name) and
(tableA.suffix = tableB.suffix).

Well I did not have a sample dataset for that illustration but I do have the AdventureWorks database, so here we go.

This first example will illustrate a query using a JOIN clause.

Results

This example illustrates a query without using a JOIN clause.

Results

As you can see the results are the same, but the queries are a tad different.

-- samson

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In this particular scenario I needed to concatenate a set of fields into a single column. So essentially I needed to trim all the leading zeros from the street number field first (via my udf_TrimLeadingZeros), then pieced the street number, pre-direction, street name and suffix all into one field. However, every row did not have a pre-direction or a suffix; nonetheless, I needed everything formatted (evenly spaced between words) and displayed as a single string.

So I figured I would use a CASE expression (http://bit.ly/PiYQF) in conjunction with a String Concatenation (http://bit.ly/FJtq9) to achieve my end result. Typically I see a period (.) appended to the pre-direction, but in this case it wasn't required. However if you do need it simply add a period to line 14 between the ticks '. ' of the attached select script (see pre-direction with periods screen shot for details).

Pre-Direction without periods

Pre-Direction with periods

Click here to download:

CREATE.udf_TrimLeadingZeros_v0.01.sql (0 KB)

Click here to download:

SELECT.Trim-Case-ConCat_v0.01.sql (0 KB)

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