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Category: T-SQL Tuesday

Building a Wordle Solver in Powershell and T-SQL

Published 2023-04-12 by Kevin Feasel

Shane O’Neill takes this T-SQL Tuesday to heart:

I got swept up in that wave for a while in the same way I got swept up in the other trends of my time, like Pokemon, Sodoku, and Angry Birds.

Eventually, I stopped when I found a PowerShell script by Kieran Walsh ( github | twitter ) where you could narrow down to the correct answer by putting in the results of your guess each round.

This hack led to me realising how much time I was spending on Wordle and that I should stop, much like I did with Pokemon, Sodoku, and Angry Birds.

So, what better thing to do than to try and recreate that PowerShell script in T-SQL

And given Shane’s time restriction, I’d say the end result is a good one.

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Stuffing Characters with STUFF

Published 2023-04-12 by Kevin Feasel

John McCormack tries out some stuff:

I don’t often go down code based rabbit holes, its just not what I do day to day but a while back, someone asked on twitter’s #sqlhelp hashtag if there was a character length limit to the STUFF function. The documentation didn’t have an answer. For that reason only, I decided to take a look. 

Click through to see what John learned along the way.

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T-SQL and Fun Puzzles

Published 2023-04-11 by Kevin Feasel

Rob Farley puzzles it out:

Back in my uni days I remember a Prolog assignment to solve “each letter represents a number” puzzles, and my solution being slow. Years later I tried it again and it worked out just fine, but by then the due date was in the past and they weren’t prepared to change my grade.

While these kinds of things can be fun (more so when there aren’t uni grades dependent on the solution), there are also times that it can be fun to rewrite some code in a way that is more intuitive, or that feels clever in a profoundly simple way.

Rob shares links to a few examples along those lines.

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The Power of Date Truncation

Published 2023-02-14 by Kevin Feasel

Magda Bronowska rounds to the nearest minute:

From MS Learn:

DATETRUNC() function returns an input date truncated to a specified datepart.

On the surface the work similarly to DATEPART(), however that function returns integer values, opposed to the dates returned by DATETRUNC() (we will see that better in the example below).

Read on for plenty of examples of this, as well as two more syntax updates in SQL Server 2022.

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The Benefit of IS DISTINCT FROM

Published 2023-02-14 by Kevin Feasel

Rob Farley enjoys the syntax:

This month, Deepthi Goguri (@dbanuggets) asks us about our favourite new feature in SQL Server 2022 or Azure. And while there are always a few, I’m going to write about why I have a particular fondness of “IS [NOT] DISTINCT FROM“, despite the fact that it’s overly wordy and the functionality isn’t actually new at all.

People understand my point that it’s a little wordy. Typing “IS NOT DISTINCT FROM” instead of “=” doesn’t sound fun to anyone, and I think “==” or “IS” ought to be fine. The fact that the functionality isn’t new… well that statement seems to raise a few eyebrows.

Read on for Rob’s take on what IS DISTINCT FROM (and its negative cousin) actually do and what performance-killing alternative people used prior to that.

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Trying out Azure Synapse Link for SQL Server 2022

Published 2023-02-14 by Kevin Feasel

Kevin Chant looks at Azure Synapse Link for SQL Server 2022:

My first topic is about a new feature that covers both SQL Server 2022 and Azure. Which is Azure Synapse Link, or to be more precise Azure Synapse Link for SQL Server 2022.

I have been doing various tests with this feature recently. Which has led to some interesting blog posts about Azure Synapse Link for SQL Server 2022.

Read on for a few more thoughts, as well as deployment scripts via Azure DevOps and GitHub Actions.

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Defending (Certain) Bad Practices

Published 2023-01-13 by Kevin Feasel

Aaron Bertrand considers the trade-offs:

For the first T-SQL Tuesday in 2023, Raul Gonzalez invites us to talk about cases where we have knowingly implemented worst practices.

Well, I have done it a lot. Most of the posts in my bad habits series are cautionary tales based on my own “learning the hard way.” There are always trade-offs with doing something correctly – maybe proper design is less efficient, or takes longer to write, or has to pass more checks. Over time, though, you start getting a feel for where it makes sense to cut these corners, and where it doesn’t.

Read on for some practical examples around Stack Overflow.

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Replication from 2000 to 2012

Published 2023-01-12 by Kevin Feasel

Deepthi Gogrui pulls a fast one:

The scenario that I faced was little challenging. We had SQL Server 2012 production server replicating data to a Server 2000 which is used for reporting purposes. Subscriber SQL Server 2000 used by the reporting team were not ready to upgrade the Server as they need to rewrite their entire application as it was using vb6 code. They need a strategy where the data can still be replicated without upgrading the Server.

As I researched, I found that it is not compatible version but planned to test the replication to see if somehow it works. I tested the replication between SQL Server 2012 as a publisher and SQL Server 2000 as subscriber. I was able to setup the transactional replication between the servers for the database but found during the initial initialization snapshot, the ANSI_PADDING setting in the snapshot generated .sch files caused the issue while the distribution job runs. 

Read on for the solution. This turned out to work despite Microsoft’s official guidance that they only support replication between SQL Server instances within two versions of each other.

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Backing up SQL Server with Multiple Solutions

Published 2023-01-12 by Kevin Feasel

Chad Callihan tells us a story:

Many years ago, a friend was using a backup/recovery tool for managing their backups. This particular tool on its own wasn’t necessarily bad. But in this case, it didn’t work well. In fact, it barely worked at all. Backups were slow to complete and restores were even slower. Attempting to restore even one database could take 10-15 minutes just to navigate a GUI and start the restore process.

It…was…very…slow…

Read on for the rest of the story. Most of the time, when I see two products used for backups, I typically see a bunch of redundant backups, with both products taking full backups.

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