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 1
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'))

There are several ways to look for a column in your SQL Server database.

Alternative 1: INFORMATION_SCHEMA.COLUMNS (T-SQL)

DECLARE @colName NVARCHAR(30)
SET @colName = 'name'

SELECT
	TABLE_CATALOG	AS 'Database',
	TABLE_SCHEMA	AS 'Schema',
	TABLE_NAME		AS 'Table',
	COLUMN_NAME		AS 'Column'
FROM
	INFORMATION_SCHEMA.COLUMNS
WHERE
	COLUMN_NAME LIKE '%' + @colName + '%'

Alternative 2: sys.columns (T-SQL)

SELECT
	sys.tables.name		AS 'Table',
	sys.columns.name	AS 'Column'
FROM
	sys.columns
	INNER JOIN sys.tables
	ON sys.tables.object_id = sys.columns.object_id
WHERE
	sys.columns.name LIKE '%' + @colName + '%'

Alternative 3: Object Search (SSMS)

In SQL Server 2000, there was an “Object Search” tool in Query Analyzer to search for objects.

To get to this tool in SQL Server 2000, either
- Go to Tools > Object Search, or
- Press F4

Unfortunately this was removed in SQL Server 2005.

But back again in SQL Server 2008:
- Go to View > Object Explorer Details
- Type object name in the Search bar
- Press Enter to Search

Yay!

Sometimes it is inevitable to encounter scenarios that will give division by zero errors

DECLARE @dividend INT
DECLARE @divisor INT

SET @dividend = 1
SET @divisor = 0

SELECT @dividend/@divisor

/*
Error:
Msg 8134, Level 16, State 1, Line 7
Divide by zero error encountered.
*/

What you can do is you can code around it, so your users and your app do not get this error.
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Assume this is your XML snippet

DECLARE @authorsXML XML

SET @authorsXML = '
<Author>
  <ID>172-32-1176</ID>
  <LastName>White</LastName>
  <FirstName>Johnson</FirstName>
  <Address>
    <Street>10932 Bigge Rd.</Street>
    <City>Menlo Park</City>
    <State>CA</State>
  </Address>
</Author>
'

Note that the examples below show how you can manipulate XML nodes – but most operations require singleton values. Ie, the changes must affect one and only one node. Thus in most the examples we specify the index of the node we want to target.

For example:

(/Author/LastName)[1]

which means we are only targetting the first instance of LastName under the Author node. If you need to do a mass update, you may need to use a cursor.

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