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GROUP BY groups rows based on one or more columns. ORDER BY sorts rows. You can use these together to sort groups. There are two options you can use for sorting groups: I’ll show examples below. At the end, I’ll talk about how SQL Server may implicitly sort groups (and why you shouldn’t depend on … Read more
You can query the information_schema.columns system view to get information about all columns in the database. Here’s an example: Here’s the first few rows this returns: TABLE_NAME COLUMN_NAME Movies Id Movies Title Movies Year In this article, I’ll show more examples of querying information_schema.columns. Get columns filtered by name Let’s say you want to find … Read more
In this article, I’ll show examples of how to execute basic SELECT queries when using EF Core. You can execute queries using LINQ or by writing raw SQL. I’ll use SQL Profiler to show the queries generated by LINQ. Note: I’ll be using .AsNoTracking().ToListAsync() in all cases. You’ll need to decide if that’s the right … Read more
Problem When you’re working with date/times in SQL and want to put a date column in ORDER BY with a CASE statement, you may run into the following error: Conversion failed when converting date and/or time from character string. Here’s an example of a query using ORDER BY with a CASE that produces the error: … Read more
Imagine you’re in the middle of Millennium Park in Chicago. You want some coffee, but want a good deal on it. You open an app and see the nearest coffee shops offering deals to anyone with this app. How did this app know the distance from you to the coffee shops? This article will show … Read more
I recently came across a complex sorting problem that required sorting the data into groups, then further sorting the data within each group. I’ll explain this problem with a concrete example, and then I’ll show the SQL query I used to solve the problem. Let’s say we have orders, departments, and users. Users can be … Read more