Muthusamy Anantha Kumar

In SQL Server, the CASE functions evaluate a list of conditions and then return one or many results. In this article, I am going to illustrate the various uses of CASE functions in SQL server, in different places. Method 1: Usage of simple case function This is the common use of a case function, where […]

In Part I and part II we saw a few ways of using the SQL Server 2005 SQLCMD command line utility. In Part III of this series, I am going to illustrate how to use scripting variables, startup scripts and variable substitution. Scripting variables come in handy when you want to set up the environment […]

In Part I we saw a few ways of using the SQL Server 2005 SQLCMD command line utility. In Part II of this article, I illustrate how to use transact SQL files and generate output. Method 7 The SQL Server 2005 command line tool, SQLCMD, can be used to input Transact SQL scripts to be […]

Producing a cross-tab report with static number of columns is a straightforward process. When comes to the dynamic number of columns, it gets tricky. This article illustrates how to generate a cross-tab query on the fly, using the EXEC statement and simple string concatenation. Let us assume a typical objective type Exam paper. Let us […]

Microsoft shipped the SQL Server 2005 command line tool “SQLCMD” along with SQL Server. This SQLCMD replaces the old ISQL command line utility and the OSQL utility. This series will illustrate the various ways of using the SQL Server 2005 command line utility “SQLCMD”. When “SQLCMD” is run from the MS-DOS command prompt, it uses […]

In SQL Server 2005, error handling was made easy. This article illustrates various methods of handling errors using the TRY and CATCH command and various ERROR_ functions. Catching the Error line number in a SQL Statement When you execute bunch of SQL statements and need to know on which line the error occurred, then you […]

In Part IV of this article series, we have seen how to partition an existing table based on certain range of dates. Part V illustrates how to merge and split existing partitions. First let us create a database with a table. Then let us insert data and then partition the table. Step 1 Let us […]

In Part III of this article series, we have seen how to partition an existing table into four parts based on a range of unique numbers. Part IV of this series illustrates partitioning based on date. In this article we are going to partition the existing data into four different parts based on certain dates. […]

In Part II of this series, we saw how to partition a table into four parts based on range of unique numbers. Part III of the article series illustrates how to partition an existing table with data into four different file groups. Step 1 Let us assume we have created the folder C:\Data2 and the […]

In Part I of this article series, we discussed how to create a simple table partition based on a range of unique numbers. In the part I of the article we did a simple partition by dividing the table into two. This article illustrates how to create a table partition by dividing the table into […]

Data partitioning, a new feature added to SQL Server 2005, provides a way to divide large tables and indexes into smaller parts. By doing so, it makes the life of a database administrator easier when doing backups, loading data, recovery and query processing. Data partitioning improves the performance, reduces contention and increases availability of data. […]