This is an expansion (and slight variation) of Joe’s answer in StackOverflow regarding the thread Find the maximum consecutive years for each ID’s in a table (Oracle SQL) using SQL Server. I’ve tested this in SQL Server 2014, but should work from SQL Server 2005 onwards where the ranking functions are supported.

The problem Joe solved is not uncommon – i.e. how to get the consecutive years of something (consecutive year sales, consecutive years in school, consecutive years volunteering etc), and his solution is pretty clever.

Let’s assume you are working on a sales database. You have multiple clients who could be purchasing from your store several times a year, or a couple of times every five years. You may want to know what’s the maximum consecutive years they’ve purchased from you. Why? Perhaps in a marketing campaign, you may want to give your loyal customers (purchased in 5 or more consecutive years) a special discount.

Your data may look like the following screenshot. Notice that in this example, Client 00001, 00002 and 00003 purchased only once. Client 00004 purchased several times, and it looks like there were purchases in consecutive years.

See full article here at sqlbelle.com

In the last post (Demystifying T-SQL Subqueries – Part I) we looked at how to use scalar subqueries. Let’s continue our subquery adventure.

As with Part I, the following T-SQL query samples are using the Chinook database.

Subqueries which return a single list of values

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When I teach SQL Server Development/T-SQL courses, subqueries is usually one of those topics that students find confusing. Usually it’s a head scratcher, although there are some who just get it.

So let’s try to demystify subqueries.

Very simply put, a subquery is just a query within a query. It’s a SELECT inside another SELECT.

Now let’s break it down. Let’s start with understanding what a query gives you first.

Understanding results of regular queries

Before we can understand subqueries, we need to understand first the different results we get from regular queries. A regular query always results in a dataset. It gives you the following variations of results:

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Just another handy code snippet for generating dates for date dimensions in your data warehouse.

I am providing just the select statement here, but to generate (massive) date records, just create and set your start and end date variables, and enclose your insert and the code below in your WHILE loop.

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Some of my projects are still in SSRS 2005 and PowerShell v1.0, so this script works and is tested on this environment only, for now.
I plan to port this to SSRS2008, PowerShell v2.0 when I get the chance.

I don’t think the code will change much; although one major change would be how I’m creating the proxy right now. PowerShell v2.0 has a cmdlet called New-WebServiceProxy.

To get this to work for PS v1.0, for now, I use New-WebServiceProxy.ps1 from http://poshcode.org/538 to create the proxy.

Steps are fairly simple
1. Create the proxy
2. Create an array of policies (ie existing users/groups for a particular report or folder)
3. Create a new policy
4. Create a new role, and add it to your policy
5. “Re”-set your policies — ex $reportserverproxy.SetPolicies($itempath,$newpolicies);

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Just a few queries against the ReportServer database that might come in handy…
Of course, these are just some sample queries. Tune and modify according to your needs …
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Jacob Sebastian is a SQL Server XML Guru!

Check out his collection for XQUery Labs. This is the first 12 of his series, and right now he has 43 and counting:

XQuery Sample Scripts

* XQuery Lab 1 – Transforming rows to columns
* XQuery Lab 2 – An example using OUTER APPLY
* XQuery Lab 3 – Filtering specific nodes
* XQuery Lab 4 – Joining XML Nodes with a Relational Table
* XQuery Lab 5 – Working with Namespaces
* XQuery Lab 6 – Processing Header-Detail information
* XQuery Lab 7 – Extracting a comma separated list of values
* XQuery Lab 8 – How to update the attribute value of an XML variable?
* XQuery Lab 9 – How to delete an attribute from an XML variable?
* XQuery Lab 10 – How to insert an attribute to an XML variable
* XQuery Lab 11 – How to insert an element to an XML variable
* XQuery Lab 12 – Different ways of reading values from an XML variable

Jacob Sebastian has also released a free ebook via RedGate – The Art of XSD – SQL Server XML Schema Collections

Check it out, all 483 pages!

If you want to list the definition for a stored procedure, User Defined Function, or Trigger, you can use one of the following ways:

Alternative 1: sp_helptext (T-SQL)

-- using sp_helptext
sp_helptext 'dbo.your_object_name'

Alternative 2: syscomments (T-SQL)

-- using syscomments
SELECT  
FROM sys.syscomments
WHERE OBJECT_NAME(id) = 'your_object_name'

Alternative 3: OBJECT_DEFINITION (T-SQL)

-- using built in function OBJECT_DEFINITION
SELECT OBJECT_DEFINITION(OBJECT_ID('your_object_name'))