Select Favorite SQL Server 2012 Articles

The following articles are a collection of my favorite SQL Server related posts over the last 6 months.

3 Steps to Work More Efficiently in SSMS. Posted 2/17/2013

Recently the 3 Steps to Work More Efficiently in SSMS article was one of my favorites. The three steps were:

Display results in a separate tab.
Hotkey for SELECT TOP 100 * FROM …
sp_help by using Alt+F1

The Display results in a separate tab is one of the first things I do when working in SSMS on a new computer.

VARCHAR diff function Posted 2/13/2013

What made the VARCHAR diff function posting one of my favorite was how it built on a number of previous articles to finally get to something that was much more useful, all based on common table expressions. The VARCHAR diff function used code from a previous posting called Using a CTE to Split a String Into Rows with Line Numbers. A couple weeks after writing the VARCHAR diff function with CTE’s I ended up using this on a project to create an automated testing script to compare the output from an outdated code project to the results from the new T-SQL implementation. The use of the VARCHAR diff function allowed for a single tester to test the work of 3 developers in a time far less than what was anticipated on this project.

The VARCHAR diff function probably isn’t something that anyone would use on a daily basis, but it is a massive time saver when needed.

TSQL 2012 – Generating letters with a SEQUENCE object Posted 11/9/2012

This article was a lot of fun. Having learned about how to use a SQL Server 2012 sequence object to generate letters at a SQL Saturday presentation, I just had to blog about this one. It was a fun post.

Adventureworks2012 data to Google GeoChart Visualization Posted 10/19/2012

On this article I pulled address data from the AdventureWorks2012 database, and covered how to extract it and reformat it correctly to display on the Google GeoChart Visualizations.

Again another fun posting.

I hope everyone enjoys these as much as I did.