Identity columns are widely used as primary key columns in SQL Server tables. They can be one of the data types TINYINT, SMALLINT, INT, BIGINT, NUMERIC or DECIMAL. Each of these data types has an upper limit and when that upper limit is reached, an error is raised and further inserts into the table are impossible.
Temporal tables was introduced in SQL Server 2016, and is a technique that simplifies keeping track of changed records in a table. The handling of changes of records in a data warehouse dimension table is a good example of when temporal tables can be useful. In this blog post, I’ll cover the basics of temporal tables.
A useful feature in the SQL Agent is the possibility to use tokens. Tokens are a number of system variables (e.g. $(ESCAPE_SQUOTE(DATE) that contains the current date) that gets expanded/replaced with a value when the job is run. An obvious use of tokens is to create a new log file with today’s date and time in the file name each time an SQL Agent job is run.
On and off I am working in SolvencyII projects (financial reporting to governments for companies in the insurance industry). There are a lot of QRT-reports (Quantitative Reporting Templates) that has to be reported to the local authorities, and a while ago Eiopa decided to change the names on all the reports.
Almost all my code in the SolvencyII projects is based on the old names, but all new and changed directives are based on the new names. And of course I keep forgetting the new names…
Toggl is a very simple to use cloud based time tracking application. Time entries on projects and clients can be submitted through the web page or through mobile and desktop applications. Time spent by the team can be viewed in the different reports that can be accessed via their web page. There is a free version that handles much of the time tracking needs, and there are more advanced paid versions as well.
If you want to integrate the information stored at Toggl with your own enviromnent, you can use their API. One way is to download time entries to your own SQL Server database, which is the method I’ll present here.
Some of the output from PowerShell cmdlets return results that can be represented as tables. So how can these results be stored in SQL Server tables?
Here’s a short tip on how to align columns (separated by comma or other character) for text files in Notepad++ for increased readability.