Partial stored procedures in SQL Server June 8, 2018 by Gerald Britton Introduction SQL is an old language — almost 50 years! The first commercially-available version of SQL was released by Oracle way back in 1969. In its specifications and general, “standard” appearance, it resembles the other leading language of the day, COBOL. Language theory and computer languages have evolved considerably since then. Modern concepts such as object-oriented programming and functional programming are not well-represented in SQL. That’s a pity. It can lead to copying code which almost always increases maintenance costs and code fragility. Read more »
Restricting and monitoring SQL Server data access with views and procedures May 17, 2018 by Timothy Smith We recently faced a leak of information for one of our employees that involved data which caused a conflict within our company, even if it was not personally identifiable information (PII data). When we investigated the issue, we uncovered that we need to organize data access for our teams and review who has access to what information. As of right now, all our users either have access to all tables directly or a subset of all our tables. What are some practices we can use in SQL Server to avoid giving direct table access to our users? Read more »
Debugging stored procedures in SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) February 20, 2018 by Ben Richardson Debugging is one of the most important but painful parts of any software process. To find some errors you have to run the code step by step to see which section of the code is responsible for the error. This is called runtime debugging. Luckily, SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) comes with automated debugging capabilities to help developers debug their scripts. In this article, we will explain practically how SSMS can be used to debug stored procedures in SQL Server by working through a very simple example. Read more »
How to email SQL query results to your smartphone using the sp_send_dbmail stored procedure July 24, 2017 by Daniel Calbimonte Introduction Sometimes there are tasks that require too much time to finish during business hours and we need to leave the office with some still pending like the migration of data, backups or long running queries. In such cases, we would still want to receive an email in our smartphones to make sure that the job was completed successfully. Read more »
How to create, configure and drop a SQL Server linked server using Transact-SQL July 5, 2017 by Marko Zivkovic Linked servers allow getting data from a different SQL Server instance using single T-SQL statement. This article will explain how to create, configure and drop a SQL Server linked server using system stored procedures. Read more »
How to calculate work days and hours in SQL Server June 26, 2017 by Sifiso W. Ndlovu Like any other enterprise RDBMS system, SQL Server ships with several built-in functions that make developers’ T-SQL code clean, convenient and reusable. To demonstrate the efficiency of functions, say we needed to retrieve a server name for one of our SQL Server instances. Well, one of doing this would be to write a SELECT statement that would query the system view [sys].[servers] from the master database as shown in Script 1. Read more »
Functions and stored procedures comparisons in SQL Server February 20, 2017 by Daniel Calbimonte Introduction In a previous article, Functions vs stored procedures in SQL Server, we compared Functions vs stored procedures across various attributes. In this article, we will continue the discussion. We will talk also about Table-valued functions and compare performance with stored procedures with table valued functions and scalar functions. Read more »
Functions vs stored procedures in SQL Server February 14, 2017 by Daniel Calbimonte Introduction Usually DBAs prefer stored procedures instead of functions in SQL Server. Is this a good practice? Read more »
Using sp_server_diagnostics January 19, 2017 by David Alcock Troubleshooting SQL Server is all about gathering the right evidence. Ordinarily we utilise a variety of different methods and analyse their output to look for specific areas where we would focus our diagnostic efforts. We could for example, use the results of various DMVs to look at wait statistic and resource information to help us focus our investigation in a particular area of SQL Server. Read more »
Creating reports based on existing stored procedures with SQL Server Reporting Services November 10, 2016 by Nesha Maric Basic extraction of the SQL Server database data is usually achieved by querying the databases and creating stored procedure to automate the extraction process. Unfortunately, extracting the information in this way will not yield high-end reports, and only basic table-shaped reports are available when extracting the information via SQL Server Management Studio or similar tools. In order to create high-end reports that will include additional projections of the data, such are graphs, lists, charts… SQL Server offers powerful reporting options within the SQL Server Reporting service. Read more »
Creating a stored procedure to fix orphaned database users January 25, 2016 by Eli Leiba The Problem This problem demonstrates a very common scenario. When a backed up database is restored to a different location or server, the restored database users that exist inside of it, lose their association to the new server login objects. This problem occurs because the server id in the user data is still the old server and must be changed to the new one. The DBA task is then to restore the connection between the login and the database user object and to link them together again. Read more »
Creating a gap in sequences – TSQL Stored Procedure advisor January 6, 2016 by Eli Leiba Introducing the Problem Gaps existence in automatic sequenced columns occurs all the time. Missing identity values (or other sequencing values) occur for a variety of Reasons. The most common reasons include: roll backed transactions, failed inserts and Deletes, large row deletes after delete commands that occur after many inserts to a sequenced table and so forth. Read more »
Creating an automatic View to an In-line table function conversion stored procedure December 22, 2015 by Eli Leiba Introducing the Problem We have a series of views in our organization’s application database. The views definitions are all static queries that consist of few or many condition clauses. When the application first started with the initial data, the views operated normally, but after a while, after a period where data volume increased, the application’s performance time, through the views usage, degraded. Read more »
The SQL Server system views/tables/functions. Common questions and solutions to real life problems December 25, 2014 by Daniel Calbimonte Introduction In this new article, we will talk about the system views/tables/functions and how to solve common questions using them. The system views are views that contain internal information about a Database. The master database for example contains information about the SQL Server itself, while the msdb database contain information about the SQL Server agent and each database has its own system views/tables. In this article we will show how to get the list of tables, views, stored procedures, how to get a list of tables of all the databases, how to find a table in multiple datatabases, how to get the list of users, logins, mapped logins, how to detect a fragmentation in a table and more. Read more »
Creating and using CRUD stored procedures April 7, 2014 by Milica Medic A typical N-tier application design contains of the several layers from the client (Web or Windows), to the Business Logic Layer, to the Data Access Layer, and finally to the Data Storage Layer. Read more »
