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Following a few requests, here are some sites you may find useful for supporting your SQL learning: General http://www.stickyminds.com/  http://www.thefreecountry.com/documentation/onlinesql.shtml (free online tutorials) T-SQL http://sqlcourse.com/ (free online tutorial) http://www.w3schools.com/sql/default.asp (free online ...

In addition to the T-SQL calendar table, which I have posted seperately, I went the whole hog and figured out the equivalent for Oracle. The only value I couldn't work out was the millisecond, which is not present on the standard date type in Oracle, but which can be retrieved and I am looking into this when I have time. This query uses the ...

As part of my current role as a tester I am often required to write the same basic expressions again and again in my queries, most noticeably to bring back data for specific date ranges, therefore for the benefit of anyone else out there who has to do likewise I have detailed below my method for returning the following basic ranges: Daily; Week ...

I regularly need to pass variables into my queries, and when running multiple tests, it helps to have a way to change these variables easily, preferably, without having to go through the query each time and change the sql. Fortunately for me TOAD (Tool for Oracle Application Developers) for Oracle offers a way to do this with bound variables. ...

In one of my frequent trips through Google on the search for how to do something (I forget what it was I was looking for on this particular occasion), I found myself, as I often do, being directing to various contributions from posts on life after coffee.com Whilst the entry it turned out wasn't relevant to what I was searching for, it did ...

Hi, following on from my previous two posts about Analytic Functions, and specifically about the lack of a T-SQL equivalent to the LAG and LEAD functions I demonstrated, there is a SQL Server feedback vote currently active which you can participate in if you are interested in seeing these functions incorporated into a future update. The vote can ...

For any number of reasons which I won’t go into, you may have a need, or desire, to return a value in a query from one row next to a value from another. A typical example might be in a daily sales database, where I want to see yesterday’s total sales against today’s total sales. It is straight forward enough to write the query to ...