Ruslan Sivak

SQL 2005 Express is a great little server from Microsoft that allows you to run a slimmed down version of SQL Server 2005 for free. You can even use it to host websites, and as long as your individual databases don't run over 4GB of storage, and you don't care about using more than 2GB of RAM, it might be the perfect candidate for your environment.

The reason Microsoft did this is to fight back against the free products from other vendors. Other alternatives include PostgreSQL, MySQL, Oracle Lite among others. With the release of this free Express edition of SQL Server, Microsoft aims to get people to use SQL Server, and keep customers from flocking to open source alternatives. Once they have you locked it, they are hoping that at some point you will either need the tools or features that are offered by the SQL Server 2005 Standard or that you will hit the 4GB database limit.

Since SQL Server Express 2005 was first released, people complained that it didn't provide full text search capabilities, among other things. With Service Pack 1, Microsoft has addressed this concern and others.

What many people don't know, however, is that part of the SP1 you can also download the Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Express Edition Toolkit SP1, which includes an Import/Export wizard, among other things. Just download it here and you will get the SQL Server Import and Export Wizard installed by default to "C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\90\DTS\Binn\DTSWizard.exe". You can even create a link to it straight from the Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio Express by going to Tools->External Tools and defining and Import/Export Wizard shortcut, by pointing the command parameter to "C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\90\DTS\Binn\DTSWizard.exe"

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This entry was posted on February 14, 2007 at 1:58 PM and has received 38353 views. There are currently 156 comments. Print this entry.

Today, when I tried to do a

Turns out you need to use the COUNT_BIG(*) function instead.

This entry was posted on January 12, 2007 at 2:59 PM and has received 8174 views. There are currently 11 comments. Print this entry.

Have you ever wanted to convert some text that you have in a database to proper case? Maybe you have data that's all in uppercase or all in lowercase, and you want it displayed properly? Here is a handy function that will allow you to do this using just SQL queries, instead of resorting to pulling the data into another programming language like ColdFusion, as that would be a lot slower.

So lets say you have data like this:

Lets see what it would look like proper cased:

Now lets update the table and see the results:

We've successfully updated all our names to propercase. Note that this function should work well with longer text and full sentences. Here is an example:

This entry was posted on January 11, 2007 at 3:22 PM and has received 5459 views. There are currently 4 comments. Print this entry.

Have you ever needed to update one table based on the contents of another table? The way to do it is with aliases.

This entry was posted on January 11, 2007 at 2:24 PM and has received 27595 views. There are currently 35 comments. Print this entry.

Let's say you need a table that has numbers from 1 to 10.

Lets say you wanted all the letters in a table. Checking www.asciitable.com, we see that A has the ASCII value of 65, and Z has the ASCII value of 90.

This entry was posted on January 10, 2007 at 3:11 PM and has received 2908 views. There are currently 5 comments. Print this entry.

Lets say you have a table with duplicate data in it, and you'd like to get rid of it easily. For simplicity's sake, lets say you have a table named names and it contains two columns, nameid and firstname.

You can see right off the bat, that you have 2 Aaron's. Lets find out how many duplicate names you have total.

Turns out we have 331 duplicate names. Now, how do we get the Id of only 1 of the names?

If you wanted to delete the record with the lowest Id, you would run this code:

If you have more then 1 set of duplicates, you can just run the last piece of code a bunch of times until you have no more rows affected, or you can put it in a loop.

This entry was posted on January 10, 2007 at 2:06 PM and has received 7774 views. There are currently 10 comments. Print this entry.