SQL Server 2012 version has ended a drought of insufficient analytical functions in SQL Server. Analytical functions like LEAD, LAG, FIRST_VALUE and LAST_VALUE that made querying and reporting easy – especially in the Business Intelligence domain. Performing analytical operations before these functions was a tedious task; Writing complex queries needed nested queries and self-joins resulting […]

Dynamic Data Masking (DDM), a valuable feature added in SQL Server 2016. Hiding sensitive data from unauthorized users is achievable using DDM. Most importantly, Masking of data and encryption are two different ways of securing data. Dynamic Data Masking uses different strategies to hide data – benefiting by not modifying stored data as Encryption feature […]

Concat multiple row values in SQL Server is a well-known familiar problem. Every database developer happened to write concatenation string queries for reporting or general purpose. Numerous methods including XML PATH, COALESCE function, Recursive CTE been used to achieve desired results.

NULLIF is a function applied to return a NULL value if specified two expressions (expression1= expression2) are equal. NULLIF function is an ANSI function, it is available with other RDBMS vendors like ORACLE, MySQL, Postgres and among others. NULLIF Function can be useful in cases when applications are using different indicators to represent a Missing […]

Implementing acceptable Error Handling logic in T-SQL code is important to avoid unexpected errors breaking the system. Exception Handling using TRY…CATCH block in Microsoft SQL Server is fairly identical to exception handling in .NET and Java programming languages. Basic Fundamental of TRY…CATCH block is a group of statements can be enclosed in a BEGIN TRY…END […]

IDENTITY property in SQL Server creates an identity type column. It generates auto-incrementing values in table by defining seed and increment values, works much like SEQUENCE object in SQL Server and Oracle. However, IDENTITY property is table dependent and SEQUENCE object works independently from the table.

SQL Server 2016 edition has included an awe-inspiring feature in Database engine that is DROP IF EXISTS along with a bunch of superior features. Option DROP IF EXISTS is used when we need to verify if an object exists in a database before creating/ dropping it. In this situation, we need to first drop existing […]

Nowadays, you barely see a PHP driven website that doesn’t store its data with a MySQL database. Released in 1995 (first version), this open-source database management system has turned into a crucial part of a website. Perhaps, this is the one major reason, many webmasters look for free MySQL hosting. If you’re one of them, […]

Database developers often name stored procedures with the SP_ prefix in SQL Server. The SP_ prefix helps other developers quickly identify an object as a stored procedure. Although there have been many debates over whether or not user created objects should be named with the sp_ prefix following the naming convention standards, we should not […]

With the introduction of SQL Server 2012, a useful feature was included: EXECUTE WITH RESULT SETS. This feature allows us to modify the column names and column data types of the result sets returned by a stored procedure without actually modifying the stored procedure code.

Creating an index in SQL Server is a moderately simple task that improves the query performance. We can create a clustered as well as a non-clustered index which can be either unique or non-unique as per requirement.

The TRY_CAST function in SQL Server is used to cast value from its existing data type to a specified target data type. This occurs only if the operation is successful. It returns NULL if the conversion fails. TRY_CAST is an extended version of the CAST function. This tutorial explains how to use TRY_CAST in SQL […]