Category: Beginner

Video: Designing Stored Procedure Solutions

My new session for 2014, “Designing Stored Procedure Solutions”, is now up on the Sessions page: abstract, video, and code! This month, I gave this session at the Oklahoma City SQL Server User Group‘s 5 year anniversary, and at the Alaska SQL User Group, to thousands and thousands* of attendees and wild** applause. I’m looking […]

Applied SQL: LIKE ‘whatever’

Today let’s play around with the LIKE operator. Like, totally. Like, Introduction Like “determines whether a specific character string matches a specified pattern. A pattern can include regular characters and wildcard characters.” That makes it pretty darn useful, say, when we’re searching for all product reviews with the word “worst” in it: SELECT ID, Comments […]

Compare tables to find missing rows

Let’s talk about the case where you want to compare tables to see what’s missing. We might be comparing a list of orders to an imported set of data in a staging table. Or, we’re identifying customers in the database that aren’t on the call list. Whatever the application, finding out the difference between one […]