table design

Script Multiple Objects [Easy]

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Have you ever noticed that you can only highlight 1 object in the Object Explorer in SQL Server Management Studio? This usually is enough for most things you do, but if you want to script multiple objects at once… it becomes a pain. Well there is a way to script multiple objects at once, and it’s super easy.

  1. Open the Object Explorer Details screen by selecting View -> Object Explorer Details.
    Script Multiple Objects 1
  2. Highlight the folder with the objects that you would like script. A list of all objects in that folder will appear on the right. This works for tables, stored procedures, etc…
    Script Multiple Objects 2
  3. Highlight all the objects that you want, right click, and select Create To.
    Script Multiple Objects 3

Parsing A Delimited String In SQL Server

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At some point in your life, you’ve probably had to parse a string inside SQL Server. Maybe you had a comma delimited string and you need the data inside a table. So, you go to stackoverflow and find some stored procedure that someone made that you don’t understand. It works, but yuck. Well… those days are over! In SQL 20016 they introduced a new table-valued function called STRING_SPLIT. This makes is very easy to parse a comma delimited string in SQL Server.

 
STRING_SPLIT Basics
The STRING_SPLIT function is really easy to use. It basically just takes 2 parameters. The first parameter is the string that you want to parse. The second parameter is the delimiter for parsing on.

The STRING_SPLIT function will always return a one column result set with a column named value.

Here’s an example of how to use it:

SELECT	value AS AnimalName
FROM	STRING_SPLIT('Dog,Cat,Bird,Walrus', ',')

[table width=”150″ colwidth=”150″ colalign=”left”]
value
Dog
Cat
Bird
Walrus
[/table]

 
If your input string has spaces by the delimiter, you just need to trim the value that you get from the function. Here’s an example of trimming the spaces and also parsing on a pipe character:

SELECT	value AS AnimalName
FROM	STRING_SPLIT('Dog |Cat |Bird | Walrus', '|')

 
 
Source: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/t-sql/functions/string-split-transact-sql

Compressing Data In SQL Server

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In SQL Server 2016 they added a sweet new featured to allow you to compress input strings and binaries. The new COMPRESS function allows the field or literal value passed in to the function to be compressed in GZip format.

 
COMPRESS
The COMPRESS function will take in an input and compress it using a GZip compression. The output from the function is a VARBINARY datatype. You can display that in a SQL Server Management window or store it in a table with a VARBINARY(MAX) field. To use the COMPRESS function, you need to pass in either VARCHAR, BINARY, VARBINARY, or CHAR datatypes.

 
How To Use The COMPRESS Function
For this example, I’m going to put the data in to a table variable. If you have a permanent table structure, you can use that instead.

DECLARE	@InsertTest TABLE
	(AnimalName VARCHAR(50),
	 AnimalStats VARBINARY(MAX))

INSERT
INTO	@InsertTest
VALUES	('Dog', 
		 COMPRESS('Height: 26 inches; Weight: 20 pounds; Color: Brown'))

SELECT	*
FROM	@InsertTest

If you’re looking to compress some data just inside SQL Server Management Studio, you can just do this:

SELECT	COMPRESS('this is the data I want to compress') AS CompressedData

 
 
How To Decompress Your Data

So now that you’ve compressed data, how to do you decompress it? As you guessed, SQL Server also added a DECOMPRESS function. It’s just as simple as the COMPRESS function, just with one little twist. The DECOMPRESS function only returns the datatype VARBINARY(MAX). You will have to cast it in to whatever you want. Here’s an example using the same script as we used above:

DECLARE	@InsertTest TABLE
	(AnimalName VARCHAR(50),
	 AnimalStats VARBINARY(MAX))

INSERT
INTO	@InsertTest
VALUES	('Dog', 
		 COMPRESS('Height: 26 inches; Weight: 20 pounds; Color: Brown'))

SELECT	*
FROM	@InsertTest


SELECT	CAST(DECOMPRESS(AnimalStats) AS VARCHAR(250)) AS DecompressedAnimalStats
FROM	@InsertTest

You can see above that I just wrapped the DECOMPRESS function with a CAST function. It’s that simple to get it in the format that you want.

 
Something To Keep In Mind: Compressed data can’t be indexed! Sorry!

Something Else To Keep In Mind: If the goal is to compress all the data in a row/table/data page/or index, SQL Server (as of 2016) now supports this using a different built-in method. So you don’t have to do it all manually.

Get Filestream Storage Directory

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Filestreams are a great way to store files in SQL Server. SQL Server makes this super easy by managing the storage of the physical files on the file system. But what if you want to get access to these files or if you want to know where they are stored. SQL Server wants you to access these files through a network share managed by SQL Server. They provide a function called PathName that you can call to get this path. You will call this function like you would call an extension method in .Net. In the example below, we will assume that the column InvoiceFile is a Filestream datatype. We call the PathName() function to get the share name to where the files are stored.

SELECT	TOP 1
		InvoiceFile.PathName() AS DirectoryOfFile
FROM	Invoice

Estimate Backup Size In SQL Server

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When you’re creating your database backup maintenance plans, you need to choose a drive that has enough space for your backup. So how much space will you actually need to backup your database? Figuring this out is actually a lot easier than you would expect.

Although nothing will be 100% accurate, SQL Server has a built in stored procedure for calculating the used space in a database. A full database backup only stores the actual data/objects in the database. The unused space is not stored. 

 
EXEC sp_spaceused @updateusage = N'TRUE'

In the example above we call the sp_spaceused stored procedure from the database that we would like the size from. This is important… you need to execute this from the database that you want to get the size for. This will return a dataset with multiple columns. The column that you will look at is the reserved column. This will show the amount of space without the unused space.

 
Note
The @updateusage parameter tells the stored procedure to update the space usage info before returning the used size. Passing TRUE in to this parameter will give us the most accurate size estimate.