Gregory Larsen

In this article, I am going to show you a number of tips for displaying numeric fields as strings. I will show you how to pad zeroes on the left side of numeric numbers, so that each number regardless of the size will be the same length. Also along those same lines below you will […]

This article will be the last in my data/time series, and will discuss the last few date functions I have yet to cover in this series. I will discuss how to use the DATEDIFF and DATEADD functions to perform different date related mathematical calculations. I will also talk about what universal time is and discuss […]

All applications need to retrieve data in SQL Server tables based on DATETIME and/or SMALLDATETIME columns. In your particular application, you may need to select records that were entered on a particular date. On the other hand, you might need to select a set of records that have a DATETIME column value for a particular […]

In my first article in this series, I discussed different aspects of entering date/time data into SQL Server DATETIME and SMALLDATE columns. This article will expand my discussion of date/time data by exploring how to use different SQL Server functions to display dates and times in different formats. Depending on your environment, your needs, and/or […]

This is the first article in a series of articles that I will discuss various aspects of working with SQL Server date/time columns. SQL Server has two different date/time columns. They are DATETIME and SMALLDATETIME. This article will define the difference between these two SQL Server date/time data types, as well as show you how […]

Are you tired of manually restoring each database on a new server when the original server has a melt down? Does the manual process seem slow, and prone to keystoke and mouse click errors? Would you like to have those restore scripts automatically built, so you only have to fire them off? Well this article […]

Do you get tired of reviewing each SQL Agent notification nightly to determine which SQL Agent jobs failed? Are there a significant number of SQL Agent job notifications that it takes a while to review each? Here is an alternative that allows you to have a single email report of all job failures. Why We […]

With SQL Server 2000 you are able to create databases or columns with a different collating setting than the server (discussed in Part 1). This is especially useful when you are trying to restore from a SQL Server 7.0 database backup, where you are not sure of the collating sequence for the SQL Server 7.0 […]

A few months ago, I was running a stored procedure (SP) that performed a cross database join on our SQL Server 2000 box. This particular procedure was processing records from a table in one database (database A), that was originally created on our SQL Server 2000 box, while also processing records from a table in […]

Have you heard about orphan SQL Server users? If not, an orphan user is a user in a SQL Server database that is not associated with a SQL Server login. Orphan users are created when a database backup from one server is restored on another server. There are a number of articles that have been […]

When I was a programmer many years ago, I remember telling the Data Administrator, “I don’t care what you name a table/column, just give me a name you can live with.” Now I’m a DBA and I still am not really concerned over the naming of SQL Server objects, as long as the name is […]

Introduction The Query Analyzer (QA) in SQL Server 2000 is greatly enhanced over the QA in SQL Server 7.0. One of the enhancements, QA templates, can increase your productivity in developing code. QA comes with over fifty canned templates that you can use. Although these templates are useful as they are installed, SQL Server exposes […]