TRY_CONVERT is a new function in SQL Server Denali CTP3, TRY_CONVERT enables you to test if a value can be converted to a specific data type, TRY_CONVERT returns a value cast to the specified data type if the cast succeeds; otherwise, TRY_CONVERT…

SQL Server Denali CTP3 brings a couple of new functions, one of these is the FORMAT function The syntax of the format function looks like this FORMAT ( value, format [, culture ] ) Here is what Books On Line has to say about the arguments that…

SQL Server Denali CTP3 brings a couple of new functions, one of these is the CONCAT function. The CONCAT function returns a string that is the result of concatenating two or more string values. The syntax of the CONCAT function looks like this CO…

Function Syntax Return value Return data type DATEFROMPARTS…

SQL Server Denali CTP3 has a bunch of new date/time functions like DATEFROMPARTS, DATETIMEFROMPARTS and EOMONTH First let's take a look at EOMONTH. The syntax for EOMONTH is EOMONTH ( start_date [, month_to_add ] ) If you pass in getdate()…

Denali CTP3 comes with the IIF function, if you have used VB or Excel then you already know how this function works. In essence this function is a shorter version of a CASE statement. The syntax is as follows IIF ( boolean_expression, true_value,…

If you have been writing queries that use ROLLUP, you are probably aware that the aggregated rows return NULL for the column that you are grouping by. What if you already have a NULL value in that column, how can you know which row is the aggregated row…

I saw this question in in Google Analytics from a Google search that hit our site.

So, how can you determice if an index is clustered or not? There are two ways, you can use either the INDEXPROPERTY function or the sysindexes/sys.sysindexes system table/view

To see how it works we will create a table with one clustered and one non clustered index on it

Here is the code for that

How can you find out if the columns that are part of the index are sorted descending or ascending in that index? For example when you create the following index

If you want to show a 1 when there is a value for something in the column and 0 if none of the rows have that values you typically do something like this