Today I needed to order some data by specific column value and I recalled the really handy FIELD function in MySQL. Here’s a demo of this feature in MySQL ?View Code MYSQL# Test table CREATE TABLE City ( Id INTEGER NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT PRIMARY KEY, City VARCHAR(50) );   # Insert some test data INSERT [...]

So exactly what is a computed column? MSDN has this to say A computed column is computed from an expression that can use other columns in the same table. The expression can be a noncomputed column name, constant, function, and any combination of these connected by one or more operators. The expression cannot be a [...]

I’ve blogged before about the usefulness of Powershell for data tasks. A few weeks ago I had a requirement at work for merging csv files and recently I needed to split a single csv file into several files. While this is easy to do using SSIS and a bit of T-SQL it is a little [...]

Progress bars can be a nice visual indicator as to how a far a task is into its workload. Windows Powershell provides us with the ability to create these within the console fairly easily. This simple code will demonstrate the basics of the Write-Progress cmdlet, which allows us to deploy progress bars in our scripts. [...]

With Powershell and SMO you can easily discover SQL Server instances running on your network in just a few lines of code. ?View Code POWERSHELL[System.Reflection.Assembly]::LoadWithPartialName("Microsoft.SqlServer.Smo") | Out-Null; $smoObj = [Microsoft.SqlServer.Management.Smo.SmoApplication];   # This gets the sql servers available $sql = $smoObj::EnumAvailableSqlServers($false)   foreach($sqlserver in $sql) { Write-Host -ForegroundColor Green "Discovered sql server: " $sqlserver.Name; } [...]