Tag Archives: T-Sql

How to html-encode special characters in T-SQL

When talking to people other than DBAs you need to transport the message contained in your data. Marketing or sales people expect formatted output and the only way to process query results for database mail is to transform them to html. Unfortunately there is no inbuilt function to html-encode special characters in T-SQL. So I decided to work on a semi-complete solution written natively in T-SQL ...

Generating a date sequence in T-SQL using a numbers table

This is a follow-up to my article How to generate a date sequence in T-SQL.

In my experience, it is frequently required to map data to points  in time – display data on a periodic schedule, aggregate access log data by time intervals and so on. It goes without saying that this mapping should be handled as quick as possible. Of course performance matters.

In my previous post I discussed a method to generate these time points on-the-fly. Here I present a full solution for pre-generating a number sequence and generate a date sequence from it (which might be stored in a table as well).

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How to generate a date sequence in T-SQL

If you ever had the pleasure to run queries over an access log I bet you had a desperate need for a date sequence to map query results to.

There are plenty of pages out there discussing the best way to create and populate number tables. After reading this great post on stack overflow I came up with a slight variation of one of the solutions mentioned there, like so:

This returns 273 records with dates from  Jan, 1 2014 to Sep, 30 2014.

The advantages of this solution are:

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