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Calculating median using the NTILE function
A while back, I was shown an absolutely gorgeous median calculation, using the new OFFSET/FETCH functionality introduced in SQL Server 2012. But this got me thinking. How can you calculate the median...
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Splitting a range string into a table
This week’s post is a requirement that I see very regularly as a developer. You get a plaintext string containing one or more ranges. Each range is comma delimited, and the start and end values of the...
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An indented representation of a parent-child hierarchy
When you’re designing reports, they can often be based on hiearchies represented by “nodes” in a parent-child setup. To the end-user, the parent-child representation doesn’t provide very much...
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Joining two SCD2 tables
A number of OLTP systems store dimension data in SCD2-like tables in order to retain all the revisions whenever the dimension information changes. In certain situations, you may come across a need to...
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Catching circular references in parent-child structures
A popular form of organizing dimensions is in parent-child structures, also known as “unbalanced” or “ragged” dimensions, because any branch can have an arbitrary number of child levels. There are many...
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A faster Fibonacci series in T-SQL
Fibonacci’s numbers are a sequence of numbers calculated using a recursion pattern that typically lends itself more to procedural programming. This makes it trickier to implement in a well-performing...
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Fun with random names
Just for laughs, we’re going to take a look at a slightly-too-complex yet elegant solution to a seemingly simple task: creating a list of 100 fictional company names for a demo database. What I need...
View ArticleAn alternative to data masking
Dynamic data masking is a neat new feature in recent SQL Server versions that allows you to protect sensitive information from non-privileged users by masking it. But using a brute-force guessing...
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How to run your CTE just once, and re-use the output
You may already know that common table expressions, like views, don’t behave like regular tables. They’re a way to make your query more readable by allowing you to write a complex SQL expression just...
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Optimizing a string split and search
We’re no strangers to doing things in T-SQL that would perhaps be more efficient in a procedural language. Love it or hate it, a T-SQL solution is easier in some situations, like my sp_ctrl3 procedure...
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