In this week's puzzle we are going to try to figure out how many uppercase, how many lowercase characters are in a column, we are also interested in how many are neither uppercase or lowercase Here is the table and the data CREATE TABLE Puzzle…

Time for this week's puzzle/teaser. I want to return the results in ascending order but without using ORDER BY If you run this code CREATE TABLE Puzzle (Col1 varchar(20) NOT NULL PRIMARY KEY CLUSTERED, Col2 varchar(20) NOT NULL UNIQUE…

In last week's puzzle SQL Puzzle: RIGHT without using the RIGHT function we looked at how to do a RIGHT function without using the RIGHT function. Today we are going to find out how many columns are even in a row. Before starting I want you to be aw…

I haven't done a puzzle for a long time so I figured let's do a simple one. Return the right 6 characters of the column but without using the RIGHT function. Here is what the table looks like CREATE TABLE #Puzzle(SomeCol CHAR(7)) INSERT #Puzzl…

Today I was checking an older server and decided to run sp_helpdb. On a bunch of databases I noticed that the owner was ~~UNKNOWN~~. The only reason I noticed this was when I tried to look at a specific database which is mirrored. I was greeted with thi…

I had to change the account that some SQL Server boxes were using to run the SQL Server services. After I changed the account on one machine from DomainName\User to DomainName\NewUser SQL Server wouldn't start up In the error log I saw the following…

If you look at the sys.sysobjects view, you will see an xtype column listed Object type. Can be one of the following object types: AF = Aggregate function (CLR) C = CHECK constraint D = Default or DEFAULT constraint F = FOREIGN KEY constraint L…

If you need to use a Dedicated Administrator Connection (DAC) via SSMS, you can't just use the Connect Object Explorer, if you try you will get the following error Dedicated administrator connections are not supported via SSMS as it establishes multi…

April Fools' Day is a day when people play practical jokes and hoaxes on each other. Why not trying to play some practical jokes on your friendly DBA :-) The first thing we are going to do is to spoof the host and program name. This is easy to do. Click on Connect, choose Database Engine, you will see the following box

Sometimes you have to insert a bunch of data and you can't use BCP or another bulk load method. When you do single row inserts, SQL Server wraps these inserts inside an implicit transaction. Did you know that if you use an explicit transaction that the…