Yesterday I demonstrated a set based technique allowing you to build a Hex string from a comma separated value list. The list would allow you to select items from 1 to 63, and build a hex string, representing all of the selections. If you were to represent the data in a binary form a string of number 1, 2, 3, […]

I found this article about personalization and marketing using big data to be really interesting. It was talking about some trends that are addressing why personalization just isn’t quite there yet. Some of the statements were really revealing in real-world terms for how big data projects are progressing. Here’s an example: One reason marketing messages and offers are still so […]

Yesterday we demonstrated how to convert a delimited list into a set using a TSQL function. Once we have the ability to convert a list of items into a set, if the set consists of a set of integers we can convert that list into a binary representation, a Decimal representation (if the list is 64 items or less) and […]

Building out applications has been a topic in these editorials for a few editions. It sort of started with the need to be innovators and drive that all forward at the clients/companies we all support. There are so many choices now. With our own systems, I really struggle choosing platforms for specific projects. Which is best is not simply a […]

Our function today is demonstrated below. It uses a Sequence (Or Tally) table containing the numbers 0 thru [some number that is big enough for your requirements]. I am using two common table expressions. The first CTE, Pointers, locates the first position of the Delimiter string. The second CTE, Segments, uses three queries to find the start position of the […]

In yesterday’s post I wrote a bit about the fact that perhaps our role is, or needs to change. It seems like this comes up fairly often – where people in this line of work feel like too much time is spent NOT doing the architecture and innovation stuff, but rather focusing on the policing stuff. Personally, I think this […]

There are lots of ways we have tried to help users find their data in the midst of a large set. Filters, ranges, and much more have been used allowing users to sort and narrow down the list, with the hope of finding what they are looking for. Who hasn’t been discouraged when running a Google search, and they aren’t […]

As I was running around doing my SQL Server “thang” – I stumbled on this post on the SQL Server Technet blog site that really had me thinking. The blog post, Are you encouraging data professionals to move from doing repairs to being innovators?, was from November, and about sending your DBAs and other data-folk to the PASS event with […]