Examples of how to Calculate Different SQL Server Dates

Every now and then, you need to take the current date and calculate some other date. For instance, you might have an application that needs to determine what date is the first day of the month, or need to know the last day of the month. Now most of you probably already know how to separate the date into its piece (year, month, day, etc.) and use those pieces along with a number of functions to calculate a date that you might need. In this article, I will be showing how to use just the DATEADD and DATEDIFF function to calculate a number of different dates you might need to use in your applications

T-SQL: Conditional WHERE clause

There are different ways of programming conditional WHERE clause.

SQL DATEDIFF Magic: Yesterday, This Week, This Month and More

Limit results to Yesterday, this week, this month and more

Data Validation to Avoid Duplicate Values

Suppose you have a spreadsheet where you are entering a list of unique values, such as invoice numbers, customer names, etc. You don’t want to duplicate any of the data, as this would cause problems down the road, but at the same time the list might be too large for you to manually verify that no duplicate values have been entered.

You can use Data Validation to ensure that no duplicate values can be entered into your list. If a user accidentally enters a duplicate, an error message will pop-up telling them that they have entered an invalid value.

Using SQLCMD to Execute Multiple SQL Server Scripts

SQLCMD offers the :r command. When :r is encountered in a SQL script, it essentially tells the SQLCMD utility to include the file referenced into the calling script. This can afford you the opportunity to break up a single script into multiple scripts that represent functional areas of the database or to replace multiple SQLCMD calls with a single call to a main SQL file. Furthermore, using the :r command to execute multiple scripts in a single batch allows you define a single set of variables which can be seen by all the included scripts (provided there is no intervening GO terminator). SQLCMD was introduced in SQL Server 2005 and is the replacement for osql which Microsoft will be deprecating in a future release.