DAVElopment - Dave's Blog on Coding and Software Development

I wrote this little table and procedure to help me remember what style 104 did, or how to get HH:MM AM/PM out of a DATETIME column. Basically, it populates a table with the valid style numbers, then loops through those, and produces the result (and the syntax for producing that result) for each style, given the current date and time. It uses also a cursor. This is designed to be a helper function, not something you would use as part of a production environment, so I don't think the performance implications should be a big concern. Read more »

The SQL SELECT INTO statement can be used to create backup copies of tables. The SQL SELECT INTO Statement The SELECT INTO statement selects data from one table, creates a new table with the exact structure and size and inserts automatically the selected data into the new table. SQL SELECT INTO Syntax We can select all columns into the new table: SELECT * INTO new_table_name [IN externaldatabase] FROM old_tablename Or we can select only the columns we want into the new table: SELECT column_name(s) INTO new_table_name [IN externaldatabase] FROM old_tablename SQL SELECT INTO Example Make a Backup Copy - Now we want to make an exact copy of the data in our "Persons" table. We use the following SQL statement: SELECT * INTO Persons_Backup FROM Persons We can also use the IN clause to copy the table into another database: SELECT * INTO Persons_Backup IN 'Backup.mdb' FROM Persons We can also copy only a few fields into the new table: ...

Unlike Microsoft SQL Server 2005 and 2008, MS SQL Server 2000 does not have a ROW_NUMBER() function which applies only to the results of a SELECT query as it doesn't store any permanent value in the DB. The way it works is in keeping with the principles of relational databases. There is no implict ordering of records in an RDBMS. Only by using ORDER BY, a particular ordering (and not sorting) can be enforced only when doing a SELECT. Since Microsoft SQL Server 2000 doesn't have ROW_NUMBER(), the need for creating a primary key column of format int with the auto-increment functionality can be achieved using the keyword IDENTITY(1,1). IDENTITY means "a unique IDENTITY for the record so long as this table exists". Usage example: CREATE TABLE jobs ( job_id smallint IDENTITY(1,1)PRIMARY KEY CLUSTERED, job_desc varchar(50) NOT NULL DEFAULT min_lvl tinyint NOT NULL CHECK (min_lvl >= 10), max_lvl tinyint NOT NULL CHECK (max_lvl <= 250) )