Category: Syntax

I continue a series on window functions:

So far, we’ve seen some really cool things we can do with window functions. That said, there are some limitations with these windows. Some of them are built into how window functions work and others are incomplete implementations of the ANSI SQL standard. Let’s go check it out.

Click through to check it out.

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Abayomi Obawomiye has style:

I recently had a requirement to load some data from a source table to another destination table. The destination columns were exactly the same as the source columns with the same data types and length. The only difference was that some columns on the destination table must be encrypted. The task was to use the SHA2_512 encryption algorithm to encrypt the “sensitive” data. I will talk more about the encryption algorithm in another post.

To achieve this, I needed to use the HASHBYTES function in SQL Server. The challenge was that this function used with the SHA2_512 encryption algorithm will return a fixed character length of 64 characters which will be longer than the character length on my destination table. As a result, SQL Server will throw a truncation error. I will demonstrate this below.

One really important point: SHA is not encryption; it’s a hash (which is why the function is HASHBYTES() instead of something like EncryptByKey() as column-level security uses). Hashes are intended to be a one-way trip, whereas encryption implies an ability to decrypt if you have the relevant key details. Here, the use looks to be obfuscating the text of sensitive data fields, perhaps for loading in a dev/test environment, and so the actions themselves are quite reasonable.

By the way, the styles Abayomi talks about are all listed in this Docs page. Turns out that if you’re using a money datatype, you can use CONVERT() to display the end result with commas.

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I continue a series on window functions in SQL Server:

As of SQL Server 2019, there is only one ordered set function: STRING_AGG(). I like STRING_AGG() a lot, especially because it means my days of needing to explain the STUFF() + FOR XML PATH trick to concatenate values together in SQL Server are numbered.

STRING_AGG() is interesting in that we categorize it as a window function and yet it violates my first rule of window functions: there isn’t an OVER() clause. Instead, it accepts but does not require a WITHIN GROUP() clause. Let’s see it in action.

Click through for a look at that, as well as a little hint that maybe we’ve seen ordered set functions before in a different guise.

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I continue a series on window functions in SQL Server:

CUME_DIST() doesn’t show 0 for the smallest record. The reason for this is in the definition: CUME_DIST() tells us how far along we are in describing the entire set—that is, what percentage of values have we covered so far. This percentage is always greater than 0. By contrast, PERCENT_RANK() forces the lowest value to be 0 and the highest value to be 1.

Another thing to note is ties. There are 117 values for customer 1 in my dataset. Rows 5 and 6 both have a percent rank of 0.0344, which is approximately rank 4 (remembering that we start from 0, not 1). Both rows 5 and 6 have the same rank of 4, and then we move up to a rank of 6. Meanwhile, for cumulative distribution, we see that rows 5 and 6 have a cumulative distribution of 6/117 = 0.5128. In other words, PERCENT_RANK() ties get the lowest possible value, whereas CUME_DIST() ties get the highest possible value.

Click through for much more detail, including examples galore.

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I continue a series on window functions:

Offset functions are another class of window function in SQL Server thanks to being part of the ANSI SQL standard. Think of a window of data, stretching over some number of rows. What we want to do is take the current row and then look back (or “lag” the data) or forward (“lead”).

There are four interesting offset window functions: LAG(), LEAD(), FIRST_VALUE(), and LAST_VALUE(). All four of these offset functions require an ORDER BY clause because of the nature of these functions. LAG() and LEAD() take two parameters, one of which is required. We need to know the value to lag/lead, so that’s a mandatory parameter. In addition, we have an optional parameter which indicates how many steps forward or backward we want to look. Let’s see this in action with a query:

Click through for that query, as well as a few more and plenty of explanation.

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I continue a series on window functions in SQL Server:

The whole concept of ranking window functions is to assign some numeric ordering to a dataset. There are four ranking functions in SQL Server. Three of them are very similar to one another: ROW_NUMBER(), RANK(), DENSE_RANK(). The fourth one, NTILE(), is the odd cousin of the family.

Unlike aggregate window functions, all ranking window functions must have at least an ORDER BY clause in the OVER() operator. The reason is that you are attempting to bring order to the chaos of your data by assigning a number based on the order in which you join.

Watch me ramble on about monotonicity and quietly admit that I learned what it was from economics, where the naming feels utterly backward (“strongly monotonic” is the “greater than or equal to” of monotonicity, whereas “weakly monotonic” is the “greater than” of monotonicity). Also, I structured this entire post so that I could get that video from The Prisoner (the good one, not the garbage one) in it.

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I have a series on window functions:

Here, we get the sum of LineProfit by CustomerID. Because SUM() is an aggregate function, we need a GROUP BY clause for all non-aggregated columns. This is an aggregate function. The full set of them in T-SQL is available here, but you’ll probably be most familiar with MIN(), MAX(), SUM(), AVG(), and COUNT().

To turn this into a window function, we slap on an OVER() and boom! Note: “boom!” only works on SQL Server 2012 and later, so if you’re still on 2008 R2, it’s more of a fizzle than a boom.

Read on for several examples of this nature.

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