Have you ever needed to store the results of a complex query in a temp table? How did you go about working out what the definition for that temp table should be, the columns and their data types? It can be a bit of a pain, not to mention time consuming to have to go... Continue Reading →
"I just tried restoring a copy of my database but now the original's in recovery" That was the panicked question that I was asked earlier today and as it's something that I've seen come up more than a couple of times, I thought I'd write up a lunchtime quickie to explain the issue. If you... Continue Reading →
Holy Database Restores Batman, sp_RestoreScript 1.1 is now available in the Undercover Toolbox and at UNDERCOVER TOOLBOX: sp_RestoreScript – A Painless way to generate SQL Server database restore scripts. This update fixes an issue that we've found when running on SQL Servers prior to 2016.
We had a little play around writing our own encryption algorithms and cracking them in Secret Codes And SQL Server, Part 1: Writing Our Own Encryption Algorithm and Cracking it. I thought I'd see if we can go a step further and start having a look at how we could take those basic ideas and try... Continue Reading →
One question that seems to come up on the forums again and again is, 'how can I see when my database was last backed up?'. There are always a bunch of answers and some very convoluted scripts thrown around. As a bit of a lunchtime quickie today I thought I'd share with you a script... Continue Reading →
After my last post on The Arcane Science of Bitwise Logic and SQL Server I was asked a couple of questions on where it's used so I thought I'd write a follow up post. At first I was going to write something on bitmaps but then a thought of another area where bitwise logic is... Continue Reading →
Bitwise logic, it seems is one of those ancient areas of computing that's only remembered by those old guys that have been kicking around for years. But what is it and how can we use it in SQL? Before we start looking at bitwise logic and the bitwise operators, we need to have a quick... Continue Reading →
I'm sure we've all been there, we need to restore a database to 11:34am, four days ago. What's the first step? To go off hunting down the relevant full and differential backups and then figure out what transaction logs we need to play in and in what order. Well here at SQL Undercover we've got... Continue Reading →
Here's a little something that came up the other day, we've got a couple of tables which we need to join together but there's no common key to join on. How do we go about attacking this? As an example consider the following, we've got two comma delimited strings that we need to join together.... Continue Reading →
