Tech News - Databases

I started to add a daily coping tip to the SQLServerCentral newsletter and to the Community Circle, which is helping me deal with the issues in the world. I’m adding my responses for each day here. All my coping tips are under this tag.  Today’s tip is to see how many different people you can smile at today. I often wave and smile at people when I drive around my neighborhood. I smile and wave at people in town, especially kids. I don’t seem to meet a lot of people these days, and with masks, I can’t always let someone know I’ve smiled or see if they smile back. I can, however, count my smiles. On a recent day I had to go to the doctor and the grocery before heading home. I smiled at these people, some of whom responded, so I’m guessing they could tell I was smiling under my mask. nurse admitting me into the facility doctor examining me 2nd nurse taking my blood receptionist returning paperwork employee walking into store cashier 3 family members Not a huge total, but I managed to get 9 people today. The post Daily Coping 21 Dec 2020 appeared first on SQLServerCentral.

I started to add a daily coping tip to the SQLServerCentral newsletter and to the Community Circle, which is helping me deal with the issues in the world. I’m adding my responses for each day here. All my coping tips are under this tag.  Today’s tip is to practice gratitude. List the kind things others have done for you. I’ve thanked people for their help, which is hard for me. I’ve learned to be gracious and accepting of help, but I don’t really like it. I try to do most things for myself in the world. However, I was injured recently, and while I could get around, it was painful. My wife, daughter, and even the kids I coach noticed and helped me out in a few ways: bringing me breakfast in bed getting my computer for me from another room carrying my backpack going to retrieve my phone from another room bringing equipment into the gym and taking it out. I thanked everyone and managed to appreciate their efforts without feeling sorry for myself. I haven’t always been able to do that. The post Daily Coping 23 Dec 2020 appeared first on SQLServerCentral.

Following up on Should There Be A Successor to PASS? I have a couple more thoughts. One of the many complaints about PASS over the years was about perceived value. Most everyone saw the value of the Summit but after that it was not a simple conversation to convince someone in the audience about the value of PASS in a way that really mattered to that person. I’ve seen some make the case better than others, but it wasn’t easy. At the same time, in many ways the only thing that mattered to PASS was whether groups or events drove registration to the Summit. I think the two of those ideas speak a bit to the dissonance felt by many about an organization that was in name at least an organization for professionals. My intent isn’t to beat on PASS, but to recognize that if we were to magically rehydrate it today, we’d have all the same old problems and pains. If we want to do better, we have to think about those pain points and I think that in turn leads us to think about what problem(s) we want to solve. For example, take user groups. If you were building designing a brand new non profit to help user groups, what would be the mission? Is it to serve all those local communities? Or is it to serve the group leader and key volunteers? PASS mattered a lot to group leaders because: Instant network and identity, access to some getting started resources Free solution for hosting the group, gathering a mailing list, and to some degree making it findable A incentive in the form of a free registration to the Summit But besides connecting Joe or Jane Attendee to PASS which might yield some future benefit, attendees at a user group saw the user group as the thing that was delivering value. I don’t see anything wrong with that, at all, but it depends on what you think that non profit in the distance is supposed to be doing. I think it serves local communities indirectly. You could say that SQLSaturday is very similar, with perhaps a better set of tools. It provides an event framework, some very light guard rails, and even some seed money and uses that to inspire and empower that one local volunteer that will make the magic happen. At the end of a SQLSaturday it’s only right that the cheers and thanks go to the organizers and speakers and other volunteers. It’s not that what PASS provided had no value, but trying to get credit for it or monetize that credit in the form of getting paid Summit registrations while not evil was a distraction from the main mission of doing good locally. A true professional association might well combine all those things, as PASS attempted, but the problem is giving each segment enough time and focus. It’s not impossible, it’s just hard. Instead, what if we built them as separate orgs, each responsible for defining a mission and a way to measure success and raising funds to enable that mission? Here’s my idea list (with generic names for now): SQLGroups. Exists to grow sql user groups and user group attendance. How we do that, well, that’s the story to write isn’t it? This is maybe 200 group leaders and a few hundred volunteers, how would it serve them? SQLSaturday. Pretty much just like it was, with perhaps one or two fewer rules! Maybe we make the framework more generic so that we could host other events or on differerent days, maybe it’s open source, or maybe it’s something that should serve a wider community than just SQL. Code Camps? What do we do if someone wants to do something along the lines of Rally or Bits? Does that fit here? SQLFamily. Why not? I’d appreciate a place where I could get news about personal events, lightly curated SQLAssociation. Building on the very raw beginnings of PASS Pro, this could be the list you join to get once a month news about SQL, links to other resources (free and paid), a market place for tools and training, maybe a way to track education credits for classes. I think this is perhaps the true replacement for PASS, with a fraction of the mission (and budget) SQLSpeakers. Why not a site/org that is just for speakers, experience or starting out? What could that provide? SQLBloggers. Much like speakers, what could this do? We could at least resurrect the blogger of the year contest. As soon as you start thinking about those, it can be exciting and confusing. Why not put groups and SQLSaturday together? Idk, maybe that is the right thing to do! Not everything needs to be free, or not for profit, or community owned. The stuff about may not be the right list, it’s certainly not a complete list. It’s a variation of my five hats theory, which is about finding and taking care of various parts of your audience. You probably noticed that the Summit isn’t on my list. Huge events are a lot of work and a lot of risk and I think better left to for profit enterprises. Maybe we’d pick an “official” event each year, or find a trusted partner. If a Summit replacement springs up we can hope that it will also try to do some good in the form of providing some grants to whatever org(s) we charter, if any. Nothing about that should preclude us from encouraging and building regional events at a lower price point. What good will we do and how do we pay for it? If we can answer those, then we can figure out an org and governance model, if one is needed at all. The post Splitting up the Mission of PASS appeared first on SQLServerCentral.

Here's a SQL Puzzle for the festive period. 2020 has been a year of many things but amongst it all, it has been the year of chess. The combined effects of the pandemic and The Queen's Gambit on Netflix have given rise to a level of interest in the game not seen for generations. So here for your enjoyment is a chess puzzle to solve using your favourite database language. The post SQL Puzzle – Eight Queens on a Chess board appeared first on SQLServerCentral.

In the previous article, I showed a bothersome little error for the Kerberos Configuration Manager software. In that article, I also showed how to resolve that error. This article has nothing to do with that previous article beyond the similarity in tool names (“Configuration Manager” being central to both). In this article, I will show you how to add or rename a network adapter to be used by SQL Server. You are probably thinking “What’s the big deal? SQL Server does that automatically.” Well, for the most part SQL Server does automatically add your network adapters for you. I would guess the success rate is somewhere in the realm of 99.999% of the time. However, that is not 100% of the time and it just so happens I have run into a couple of occasions where the NIC was not properly presented to SQL Server for use by SQL Server or even configuration by the DBA. This presents a bit of a problem! Add a Network Adapter to SQL Server Configuration Manager Before diving into adding a network adapter, let’s take a look at what the network properties pages might look like in SQL Server Configuration Manager. Many of you are likely very familiar with this already. If you are not, you should be! In SQL Server Configuration Manager, expand “SQL Server Network Configuration, then click on the Instance for which you are interested. Note here that I am showing a multi-instance server. Adding multiple network adapters is a configuration method that I frequently use when dealing with a multi-instance server. There are several benefits to having multiple network adapters such as: 1) being able to have each instance listen on the same port – but different adapters, 2) being able to add an A record in DNS for each instance, and 3) adding a layer of security by obfuscation  (e.g. developers don’t know the instance name – just an alias for it). In the case where there will be multiple Network Adapters presented to SQL Server, the first thing to do is to disable “Listen All” in the case where multiple Instances exist on the server and you are looking for a more advanced setup. With that configuration set, the next page you should be familiar with is the “IP Addresses” page. This is the page where the network adapters should be found. The preceding image is a very busy image. There are three network adapters on this particular server. Each network adapter is assigned to a different IP address and each has a different port. In this case, which happens to be a multi-Instance server, not all of the assigned adapters are listening on the specified port. This is a desired configuration when everything is working well. This is where the problem that is the basis for this article comes into play – what happens when the network adapters do not automatically show up in SQL Server Configuration Manager (SSCM)? Alternatively, if the adapters are all showing, how do I keep them all straight in SSCM so I can make sure the correct adapter is enabled/disabled for the instance in question? Let’s add that Network Adapter Now SQL Server should detect a new network adapter when it is added to windows. Sometimes, it takes a server restart. Sometimes it never shows up. And sometimes it shows up but you want to rename it. Some will say to just run a repair on your instance if it is not showing the network adapter changes. After a recent experience with that, I say don’t bother with the repair! In a recent adventure with this problem, I had two adapters presented to the server prior to installing SQL Server and only one of the adapters was recognized by SQL Server. Clearly, the attempt after that would have been fruitless because the setup didn’t find the second adapter. Additionally, the running of repair on the server could cause more harm than it might fix. So, if we don’t want to run repair, then what should we do? Regedit to the rescue! Oh no, not that! Isn’t that risky as well? Truth be told, editing the registry can cause damage if you are careless, reckless, and maybe in a bad mood. Editing the registry is no more dangerous than altering data in a database. Just take a few precautions if you are worried. Some precautions might include taking a backup of the registry or maybe a system state backup of the server. These are the same sorts of precautions a good DBA would take when altering data in a database (backup the data, backup the server etc). Let’s see what hacking the registry would entail. First and foremost, the path we are looking for in the registry is a bit long and hairy and you must pay particular attention here. [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWAREMicrosoftMicrosoft SQL ServerMSSQLXX.[YourInstance Identifier]MSSQLServerSuperSocketNetLibTcp] In the preceding image, my path is (circled in red at the top of the image) [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWAREMicrosoftMicrosoft SQL ServerMSSQL14.DIXSEPTLATIN1MSSQLServerSuperSocketNetLibTcp] where my version of SQL is 14 (replacing the XX) and my instance identifier is DIXSEPTLATIN1 (replacing “[YourInsance Identifier]“). Once Tcp is expanded, you will see all of your adapters that are usable in SSCM. In order to change any of these adapters (or to add a new one), the first step is to export the key for either the adapter to be changed or for the adapter to be used as a model in order to create the missing adapter. As noted in the image, you will export the key to a reg file. Everything in IP2 shown in the image will then be exported and saved. It is this exported reg file that we will edit in order to create a new adapter (or rename an adapter). Here is an example of an edited reg file that is ready for import into the registry. In this example I have only made a couple of changes for this demo adapter. In this case, I named the adapter to match the instance name for which it will be assigned and “listening”. Then I proceeded to modify the IPAdress (in red) to the appropriate IP address that has been reserved for that network adapter. You will need to modify each of these settings as best suits your needs. I like to name the adapters to match the instance because then it becomes very easy to keep straight and troubleshoot in the future. After making the adjustments in the file, then it is time to save the file and “import” it into the registry. This step is easy – just double click the file from explorer and you will be prompted with some warnings about writing data to the registry. Once imported, I see something like this in my registry. See how that adapter has been added in the registry? This is precisely what we want. Now when we look at the network properties pages in SSCM for this Instance (because this is Instance specific), we will see a graphical representation of that adapter that we can edit. One major caveat illustrated in this image of the IP Addresses page in SSCM is that the adapter name is different than what I showed in the reg file. This was done to help illustrate a requirement here. If the adapter name does not begin with “IP” then SSCM will not pick up the new adapter. You must name your adapters with an IP in front for it to be usable in SSCM. Now that you have more adapters added and named to your liking, you are set for a more custom setup for SQL Server that allows you greater security and flexibility. Put a bow on it In this article I have demonstrated a fairly simple method to help you modify your network adapters that are presented to SQL Server. Being able to modify these adapters is essential in multiple different scenarios such as the adapter is just plain missing or you want to rename the adapters in order to more easily manage the server in SSCM. Interested in more back to basics articles? Check these out! Want to learn more about your indexes? Try this index maintenance article or this index size article. This is the second article in the 2020 “12 Days of Christmas” series. For the full list of articles, please visit this page. The post Simple Method to Add A Network in SQL Configuration Manager first appeared on SQL RNNR. Related Posts: How To Resolve User Error in Kerberos Configuration Manager December 26, 2020 Configuration Manager is Corrupt December 17, 2019 CRM Data Source Connection Error January 23, 2020 The Gift of the SPN December 10, 2019 Changing Default Logs Directory - Back to Basics January 4, 2018 The post Simple Method to Add A Network in SQL Configuration Manager appeared first on SQLServerCentral.

This is a very brief post to inform you that PASS has died, killed by the for-profit company behind it. That’s sad beyond words, but we, as a community, are not destined to the same fate. The community will rise again and build something new. One of the things that we don’t want to lose is SQLSaturday. It’s been a substantial vehicle for involving community members locally and globally. It has been the launchpad for many community speakers. It has been the opportunity for many people to connect with other community members, share their knowledge and learn something new. Connect, share, learn… that sound familiar, right? We don’t want to take the existing SQL Saturday and give it a new name, we want to start a new community initiative that enables us to continue delivering events. It needs to be a platform that allows us to continue doing what we were doing. Do you want to be involved? Here’s what you can do: Head to datasaturdays.com and have a look. There’s not much content right now, but you have to start from something… Go to GitHub and join the discussion There are many aspects that we need to cover and we know we’re not perfect right now. Please bear with us, we want to improve. The main message here is that we need your help to continue running events for people to share, network and learn. A name a just a name and there’s more that identifies our community. Come and help us, be a part of the solution The post SQLSaturday is dead, long live DataSaturdays appeared first on SQLServerCentral.

Alex is a Data Platform MVP who loves DevOps. He’s has been helping data professionals apply DevOps principles to relational database development and deployment since 2010. He’s most proud of helping Skyscanner develop the ability to deploy 95 times a day. Alex has worked with clients on every continent except Antarctica – so he’s keen to meet anyone who researches penguins. Source The post ASF 035: Alex Yates interview (part 2) appeared first on SQLServerCentral.

In the previous article Find columns with NULL values across the table we discussed that storage space can be saved by removing columns with NULL value across the table or marking them as SPARSE. We also learnt about the query to find all such columns across the tables of a database. In this article we’ll learn to estimate the storage saving by taking the necessary action on the columns with NULL value across the table, either by removing them or by marking them as SPARSE. It becomes extremely important to be ready with the relevant data and stats when we propose anything. Similarly, when we’ve to approach the Sr. Leadership for the approvals to take any such actions on the Production database, we need to have the data supporting our claim of storage savings. I found this query very useful. It helped me with the table wise data which we finally aggregated for the total storage savings. This query provides the following columns as the output. TableName : This gives the name of the table TotalColumns : This gives the count of columns in the table with NULL values across. TotalRows: This gives the count of rows of the table Estimated_Savings_Bytes: This gives the estimation of storage savings in bytes. Note: You may find a table tables_with_null_values_across being referred in the query. This is the same table which was created in the previous article. This article is the continuation of Find columns with NULL values across the table. SELECT DV.TableName , COUNT(DISTINCT DV.ColumnName) AS TotalColumns , DV.TotalRows , SUM(DV.TotalRows * CASE WHEN COL.DATA_TYPE IN ('CHAR', 'NCHAR') THEN COL.CHARACTER_OCTET_LENGTH WHEN COL.DATA_TYPE = 'TINYINT' THEN 1 WHEN COL.DATA_TYPE = 'SMALLINT' THEN 2 WHEN COL.DATA_TYPE = 'INT' THEN 4 WHEN COL.DATA_TYPE = 'BIGINT' THEN 8 WHEN COL.DATA_TYPE IN ('NUMERIC', 'DECIMAL') THEN 9 WHEN COL.DATA_TYPE = 'FLOAT' THEN 8 WHEN COL.DATA_TYPE = 'DATE' THEN 3 WHEN COL.DATA_TYPE = 'TIME' THEN 5 WHEN COL.DATA_TYPE = 'SMALLDATETIME' THEN 4 WHEN COL.DATA_TYPE = 'DATETIME' THEN 8 WHEN COL.DATA_TYPE = 'BIT' THEN 1 ELSE 2 END) Estimated_Savings_Bytes FROM tables_with_null_values_across DV WITH (NOLOCK) INNER JOIN INFORMATION_SCHEMA.COLUMNS COL WITH (NOLOCK) ON COL.TABLE_NAME = PARSENAME(DV.TableName, 1) AND COL.COLUMN_NAME = PARSENAME(DV.ColumnName, 1) GROUP BY DV.TableName , DV.TotalRows The post Estimating the storage savings by removing columns with NULL value across the table or marking them as SPARSE appeared first on SQLServerCentral.

I started to add a daily coping tip to the SQLServerCentral newsletter and to the Community Circle, which is helping me deal with the issues in the world. I’m adding my responses for each day here. All my coping tips are under this tag.  Today’s tip is to be generous and feed someone with food, love, or kindness today. My love language is Acts of Service, and I do this often, preparing things for the family when I can. Recently I asked my son what he’d want for dinner. He comes down once or twice a month from college for a few days, and I try to ensure he enjoys the time. His request: ramen. I put this together for him, and the family, last Friday night. The sushi I bought, because that’s something he enjoys, and I’m not nearly as good as some local chefs. The post Daily Coping 17 Dec 2020 appeared first on SQLServerCentral.

I started to add a daily coping tip to the SQLServerCentral newsletter and to the Community Circle, which is helping me deal with the issues in the world. I’m adding my responses for each day here. All my coping tips are under this tag.  Today’s tip is to buy and extra item and donate it to a local food bank. The food bank has always been important to me. I used to volunteer with my kids, helping them understand how lucky they are and how others may not be. Every year, I’ve tried to donate some supplies to either of those close to me, though probably not often enough. This year, with the strange world we live in and fewer trips, I know there are plenty of people in need. I decided to do some extra donations to the local bank. Rather than give them some food items, I purchased some local gift cards and gave them. The food bank uses these for perishable items, like milk,  eggs, etc. I also set a reminder to do this regularly. The post Daily Coping 18 Dec 2020 appeared first on SQLServerCentral.

Spark ML in .NET for Apache Spark Apache Spark has had a machine learning API for quite some time and this has been partially implemented in .NET for Apache Spark. In this post we will look at how we can use the Apache Spark ML API from .NET. This is the second version of this post, the first version was written before version 1 of .NET for Apache Spark and there was a vital piece of the implementation missing which meant although we could build the model in . The post TF-IDF in .NET for Apache Spark Using Spark ML v2 appeared first on SQLServerCentral.

SQLOrlando Annual Plan 2021 FinalDownload Over the past couple years we’ve been slowly evolving from a fairly adhoc plan of doing what we did last year to a semi structured plan that was mainly bullet points to a more structured and written out plan for 2021. Writing out a formal (ish) plan supports these goals: Explain clearly to the Board (of SQLOrlando) what we intend to do (and ultimately they can accept or amend the plan – it’s been approved for 2021) Explain clearly to our community what we intend to do – this document is already public (but not announced) It’s our authorization to spend It’s way to work on continuity. If one of us gets tired, distracted, whatever, we have a map of where to go (and an operating manual and Trello Board to support it) Not least, it makes us think about what we want to do. I like having a plan. It’s certainly a less than perfect plan and I’m sure things will change (already have with the end of PASS). It was written without nearly enough community input, something I hope we can improve on next year. I like transparency and for me, this is walking the walk. No reason for secrets here. It’s an ambitious plan for sure and my goal isn’t to say that you need to do what we’re doing in terms of the number or types of events. Borrow ideas if you like them, absolutely, but do the things that excite you, your volunteers, your community. It’s easy (well, sorta) to do more events, but it’s a lot harder to get more people to attend a single event, something we haven’t figured out in Orlando. If you write a plan for your group, public or not, I’d love to see it. More ideas, different implementations, I’ll take those wherever I can find them. The post The 2021 Plan for SQLOrlando appeared first on SQLServerCentral.

For all the groups the most immediate need is to rescue what they can of the mailing list stored at PASS.org and to have a new landing page and/or meeting registration site. The challenge on the mailing list is that you can’t export it (privacy!), so the best you can do is email (multiple times) to give people the new home of your group. We’ve been using Meetup for all our free events and it’s been decent, it’s biggest strength is that people find us far more often than they did by joining PASS (they had to know to join). The downside for a group of more than 50 members is that you have to pay. In Orlando that has been $180 a year, but it looks like that might be increasing. It’s far less capable than Eventbrite for paid events. For us it’s been worth it, but we’re in the same situation as with PASS – if something happens to Meetup, we lose the list. That means either finding something we like better or building out an alternate list (LinkedIn groups are not bad for this) because I really don’t like a single source of failure. Whether you need anything more than Meetup (or whatever equivalent you pick) is really up to you. In Orlando we run sqlorlando.org on WordPress (the hosted version) for about $45 a year (so that we can use our domain). It’s not much to look at it so far, but we’ve budgeted some time and money to work on that this year. It’s important as a non profit to have some place to post by-laws and minutes (Meetup doesn’t let you upload files) and I see some value in whenever I meet someone that is interested in being able to say “just go to sqlorlando.org and you’ll find all the things”. It’s one more thing to pay for and maintain, so it’s definitely optional depending on your goals. To say that differently, I’d say think about will work for your group. You haven’t got a lot of time, but you have some time to decide. Last night I removed the reference to PASS from our site, added a task to remove it from our operating manual when we do the next update, and removed the link/suggestion to join from the announcement email we send when someone joins Meetup. Today I’m going to update our Trello template cards to remove the tasks for emailing the group monthly, posting new events, and closing out completed events. It’s still important to track what’ve we done, so I added a couple more columns to our planning sheet for now. To a degree this simplifies the workflow for us. Planning/Execution Tracking Not to minimize the jump through hoops exercise at the end of the year, but once you figure out where to send people and try to get some of the list to move you’re back to where you were – running your group. Whether it feels that way probably depends on your group identity. Orlando back in 2004 was just a PASS chapter, we did it the way they suggested (more or less) and that was ok. In 2020 we’re a non profit that chose to align with PASS because it aligned with our goals for serving the Orlando tech community. At the monthly meeting level losing PASS just doesn’t change what we do at all (clearly the bigger and more painful impact is losing SQLSaturday.com and I’ll write more on that in the next week or two). None of that removes the emotional impact. We’re still a network, just more loosely coupled than we were – for now. December is a good time for reflecting and planning, so maybe spend an hour or two thinking about how your group can serve your local community next year and write it down given all the changes. In my next post I’ll share what we had planned for next year (though you can see the event list above already) in Orlando and how we’ll be amending that plan. The post Some Post-PASS Thoughts on Local User Groups appeared first on SQLServerCentral.

Another post for me that is simple and hopefully serves as an example for people trying to get blogging as #SQLNewBloggers. Cursors are not efficient, and not recommended for use in SQL Server/T-SQL. This is different from other platforms, so be sure you know how things work. There are places where cursors are useful, especially in one-off type situations. I recently had a situation, and typed “CREATE CURSOR”, which resulted in an error. This isn’t valid syntax, so I decided to write a quick post to remind myself what is valid. The Basic Syntax Instead of CREATE, a cursor uses DECLARE. The structure is unlike other DDL statements, which are action type name, as CREATE TABLE dbo.MyTable. Instead we have this: DECLARE cursorname CURSOR as in DECLARE myCursor CURSOR There is more that is needed here. This is just the opening. The rest of the structure is DECLARE cursorname CURSOR [options] FOR select_statement You can see this in the docs, but essentially what we are doing is loading the result of a select statement into an object that we can then process row by row. We give the object a name and structure this with the DECLARE CURSOR FOR. I was recently working on the Advent of Code and Day 4 asks for some processing across  rows. As a result, I decided to try a cursor like this: DECLARE pcurs CURSOR FOR SELECT lineval FROM day4 ORDER BY linekey; The next steps are to now process the data in the cursor. We do this by fetching data from the cursor as required. I’ll build up the structure here starting with some housekeeping. In order to use the cursor, we need to open it. It’s good practice to then deallocate the objet at the end, so let’s set up this code: DECLARE pcurs CURSOR FOR SELECT lineval FROM day4 ORDER BY linekey;OPEN pcurs...DEALLOCATE pcurs This gets us a clean structure if the code is re-run multiple times. Now, after the cursor is open, we fetch data from the cursor. Each column in the SELECT statement can be fetched from the cursor into a variable. Therefore, we also need to declare a variable. DECLARE pcurs CURSOR FOR SELECT lineval FROM day4 ORDER BY linekey;OPEN pcursDECLARE @val varchar(1000);FETCH NEXT FROM pcurs into @val...DEALLOCATE pcurs Usually we want to process all rows, so we loop through them. I’ll add a WHILE loop, and use the @@FETCH_STATUS variable. If this is 0, there are still rows in the cursor. If I hit the end of the cursor, a –1 is returned. DECLARE pcurs CURSOR FOR SELECT lineval FROM day4 ORDER BY linekey;OPEN pcursDECLARE @val varchar(1000);FETCH NEXT FROM pcurs into @valWHILE @@FETCH_STATUS = 0 BEGIN ... FETCH NEXT FROM pcurs into @val ENDDEALLOCATE pcurs Where the ellipsis is is where I can do other work, process the value, change it, anything I want to do in T-SQL. I do need to remember to get the next row in the loop. As I mentioned, cursors aren’t efficient and you should avoid them, but there are times when row processing is needed, and a cursor is a good solution to understand. SQLNewBlogger As soon as I realized my mistake in setting up the cursor, I knew some of my knowledge had deteriorated. I decided to take a few minutes and describe cursors and document syntax, mostly for myself. However, this is a way to show why you know something might not be used. You could write a post on replacing a cursor with a set based solution, or even show where performance is poor from a cursor. The post Basic Cursors in T-SQL–#SQLNewBlogger appeared first on SQLServerCentral.

I started to add a daily coping tip to the SQLServerCentral newsletter and to the Community Circle, which is helping me deal with the issues in the world. I’m adding my responses for each day here. All my coping tips are under this tag.  Today’s tip is to contact someone who many be alone for feeling isolated. I call my Mom every week or so, knowing she’s alone. She’s content, but I do know that life is better with people in it. However, I know my brother and other family talk with her, so I’m not too concerned. I do have other friends that I know are without a partner in life, either young or older, and I decided to reach out recently when I typed this post. In this case, I have a friend I know that lives alone. This person has family, but I don’t know how often they see anyone in person or have a conversation. I sent a message, and then had a conversation back and forth, just catching up. It made my day. Hopefully they can say the same. The post Daily Coping 28 Dec 2020 appeared first on SQLServerCentral.