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12 Dec 08

Less Than Dot - Blog - The Ten Most Asked SQL Server Questions And Their Answers

The Ten Most Asked SQL Server Questions And Their Answers
by SQLDenis

Permalink 10 Dec 2008 10:09 , Categories: Data Modelling & Design Tags: answers, questions, sql server 2000, sql server 2005, sql server 2008

If you are active in the SQL Server newsgroups and forums as I am, you will notice that the same questions keep popping up all the time. I picked ten of them which I see daily. Since this became a pretty long blogpost I have linked all the questions below to jump to the question itself.

1) Selecting all the values from a table for a particular date
2) Search all columns in all the tables in a database for a specific value
3) Splitting string values
4) Select all rows from one table that don't exist in another table
5) Getting all rows from one table and only the latest from the child table
6) Getting all characters until until a specific character
7) Return all rows with NULL values in a column
8) Row values to column (PIVOT)
9) Pad or remove leading zeroes from numbers
10) Concatenate Values From Multiple Rows Into One Column



1 Selecting all the values from a table for a particular date

This is a very popular question and people sometimes answer that you need to use between. There is a problem with between if you happen to have a value at exactly midnight. Let us take a look, first create this table.
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1. CREATE TABLE SomeDates (DateColumn DATETIME)

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Insert 2 values
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1. INSERT INTO SomeDates VALUES('2008-10-02 00:00:00.000')
2. INSERT INTO SomeDates VALUES('2008-10-01 00:00:00.000')

Code is hidden, SHOW

Return everything between '2008-10-01' and '2008-10-02'
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1. SELECT *
2. FROM SomeDates
3. WHERE DateColumn BETWEEN '20081001' AND '20081002'
4. ORDER BY DateColumn

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This works without a problem, we get this returned

(results)
2008-10-01 00:00:00.000
2008-10-02 00:00:00.000

Let's add some m

blogs.lessthandot.com/...-asked-sql-server-questions--1 - Preview

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