Soundex is a phonetic algorithm for indexing names by sound, as pronounced in English. It was developed and patented in 1918 and 1922.
One of the functions available in SQL Server is the SOUNDEX() function, which returns the Soundex code for a given string.
If you use Oracle Database or MySQL, you’re lucky enough to have the LPAD() and RPAD() functions, which allow you to pad a string with a given character (or characters) to its left and/or right.
However, SQL Server (or more precisely, T-SQL), doesn’t include these functions. So if you need some left padding, you’ll need to improvise.
This article presents four options for padding a number with leading zeros in SQL Server. So you can do stuff like turn 7 into 007. Three of these options work on strings, so you can also apply padding to textual data.
In SQL Server, you can use the T-SQL REPLACE() function to replace all instances of a given string with another string. For example, you can replace all occurrences of a certain word with another word.
One of the functions included in T-SQL is the UNICODE() function. You can use this function with SQL Server (and Azure) to return the Unicode value of a given character.
This function works similar to the ASCII() function, except that it returns the Unicode value.
If you ever need to find the ASCII code for a given character when using SQL Server, the T-SQL ASCII() function is probably what you need.
The ASCII() function returns the ASCII code value of the leftmost character of a character expression. Simply provide the character as an argument and SQL Server will return the ASCII value of that character (or the leftmost character in the string).
Starting with SQL Server 2017, you can now use the T-SQL TRANSLATE() function to translate one or more characters into another set of characters.
At first glance, you might think that the TRANSLATE() function does exactly the same thing as the REPLACE() function, but there are significant differences between the two.
In SQL Server, you can convert any lowercase string to uppercase by using the UPPER() function.
To use it, simply pass the string as an argument when calling the function.
In SQL Server, you can convert any uppercase string to lowercase by using the LOWER() function.
Simply provide the string as an argument when you call the function, and it will be returned in lowercase form.
If you ever find yourself wanting only the first part of a string, or the last part of it, this article might help.
This article is specific to SQL Server, but the functionality is pretty common across most/all database management systems, not to mention most programming languages.
When working with SQL Server, you can use theT-SQL LEFT() and RIGHT() functions to return any given number of characters from the left or right of a string.
Starting from SQL Server 2008, the REVERSE() function can be used to reverse the order of a string. That is, it returns the characters in the string in reverse order.
Here’s the syntax:
REVERSE ( string_expression )
Where string_expression is an expression of a string or binary data type. It can be a constant, variable, or column of either character or binary data.