29Aug 2017 by Grant Fritchey 6 Comments

Database Fundamentals #8: All About Data Types

Database Fundamentals
SQL Server provides all different kinds of data types in order to give you more flexibility and control for how you store your data. You define these data types as you define the columns in your tables. If you wanted to store information about the date and time that a purchase was made online you’re going to store the values in a column, or columns, that define dates and times in order to ensure accuracy in your data. Choosing a Data Type You could make the data type into one that stores just about anything you give it, such as one of the character types like char or varchar. Do this and you’re going to run into issues when you start running queries against that data. For example, your business…
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12May 2016 by Grant Fritchey 9 Comments

Use The Correct Data Type

SQL Server, SQL Server 2016, T-SQL
Blog post #5 in support of Tim Ford’s (b|t) #iwanttohelp, #entrylevel. Read about it here. Saying that you should use the correct data type seems like something that should be very straight forward. Unfortunately it's very easy for things to get confusing. Let's take a simple example from AdventureWorks. If I run this query: SELECT a.ModifiedDate FROM Person.Address AS a WHERE a.AddressID = 42; The output looks like this: 2009-01-20 00:00:00.000 Normal right? You see the year, the month and the day followed by the time in hours, minutes, and seconds as a decimal. Ah, but there is an issue. This query is supposed to be for the reporting system, and the business only cares about the date that the values in the Person.Address table have been modified, so they don't want…
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