I’m currently putting together some notes on a series I’d like to share with all of you. This series will cover the fundamentals of Transactional SQL (T-SQL). I’m hoping that it will grow into an introduction to database development. I’ll begin with the very basics of what a database is, and what SQL is. Then…
String Manipulation — CAST and CONVERT
So far I’ve shown you just a few of the many string manipulation functions available in Microsoft SQL. Today we’re adding two more of these tools to your tool belt. CAST and CONVERT. These two become useful when you’ve stored a value as one data type, and later find you need it used as another. …
String Manipulation — REPLACE, PATINDEX and Regular Expressions
In the previous SQL posts, I showed you SUBSTRING, then I showed you REPLACE. Now, with REPLACE, you had to know what characters you wanted to replace. What if you only knew what characters you wanted to keep? Well, let me introduce you to PATINDEX. This is an advanced command that is easy to learn,…
String Manipulation — REPLACE
In the last SQL post, I showed you SUBSTRING, and how you could use it to locate the area code in an un-formatted phone number. The problem was the field we were working from was full of malformed numbers. Today, we’ll start on cleaning up the numbers. But first, I need to include my standard…
Work, work, then some more work.
After the last post, I worked on getting a heating system put into the addition. As of last night, that’s done. It only cost 3 grand. (that’s more than i used to make in 7 weeks) I am ever so thankful to have a job that pays me a good wage. If i was still…
Project 1
I’ve been back from Christmas for nearly a week now. I’ve accomplished much more than I thought I was going to be able to this week. I have been able to create my XML parser that will allow myself and others to develop forms more rapidly. Basically the way it will work is, you will…
The Incredibles
I went to see The Incredibles yesterday. It was a great flick. It has a very unique animation style, within moments, you’ll notice it. The have gone out of their way to make it feel like an old school comic book. In fact many of the heroes are based on characters you know. For example,…
Changes to ToyboxCreations!
I hope you all can appreciate the new face lift I’ve given the site. This version is built from scratch in PHP with a MySQL backend. The template is based on a demo site I found online. If you are interested, check out google images for “web site templates”, there are thousands of amazing templates…
String Manipulation — SUBSTRING
Sooner or later in SQL, you’re going to be asked to change how some text is formatted. Making changes to text is pretty straightforward. First, you need to know that when you’re manipulating text (in SQL it’s stored as a VARCHAR or NVARCHAR), you’re manipulating a string. If you think of the string to the…
My Milage Widget
After getting back from a long vacation weekend filled with plenty of driving, I started thinking. How many miles have I driven. Not just today, not just this week, but since I started driving. I started thinking back to my truck. I got it with 1.7 miles on the odometer. So I started thinking about…