In SQL Server, you can create DML triggers that execute code only when a specific column is updated.
The trigger still fires, but you can test whether or not a specific column was updated, and then run code only if that column was updated.
You can do this by using the UPDATE() function inside your trigger. This function accepts the column name as its argument. It returns a boolean.
SQL Server has a database mail option that you can use to send mail from the database server.
For example, you can get notifications when SQL Server Agent jobs finish running or fail, or when there’s a high-severity error, etc.
Continue readingIf you find yourself needing to send an email automatically upon certain events occurring in SQL Server, you can do this via a trigger.
For example, you could automatically send an email when somebody deletes or updates a record from a table, etc.
To do this, you need to create a trigger that includes code for sending the email upon the required event.
Continue readingWhen you create a trigger in SQL Server, you have the option of firing it in conjunction with the triggering statement (i.e. the SQL statement that fired the trigger), or firing it instead of that statement.
To fire the trigger instead of the triggering statement, use INSTEAD OF argument.
This is in contrast to using the FOR or AFTER arguments. When you use those arguments, the trigger fires only when all operations specified in the triggering SQL statement have launched successfully.
In SQL Server, you can use the CREATE TRIGGER statement to create a trigger.
A trigger is a special type of stored procedure that automatically runs when an event occurs in the database server.
You can create a DML trigger, a DDL trigger, or a logon trigger.
This article provides an example of creating a DML trigger.
Continue readingSQL Server supports partitioned tables and indexes. When a partitioned table or index is partitioned, its data is divided into units that can be spread across more than one filegroup.
Therefore, to create a partitioned table in SQL Server, you first need to create the filegroup/s that will hold each partition. You also need to create a partition function and a partition scheme.
So it goes like this:
Below is an example of using these steps to create a table with four partitions.
Continue readingError message 213 is a common error that happens when you try to insert values into a table without explicitly specifying the column names.
The error looks like this:
Msg 213, Level 16, State 1, Line 1 Column name or number of supplied values does not match table definition.
It occurs when you specify the wrong number of values for that table. In other words, the number of values you provide doesn’t match the number of columns in the table.
Continue readingSQL Server’s Database Mail has a stored procedure called sp_send_dbmail that you can use to send emails from SQL Server.
By default, emails are sent as text, but you can easily change this, so that they’re sent in HTML format.
The @body_format argument is what you use to switch over to HTML format.
If you’re using Database Mail in SQL Server, you may occasionally need to stop or start the mail queue.
You can do this with T-SQL by using the sysmail_stop_sp stored procedure to stop the queue, and the sysmail_start_sp procedure to start it.
If you’ve ever used SQL Server’s Database Mail to email the results of a query, you might have noticed that the results are separated by a space by default.
This is fine if you want a space-separated result set, but what if you want it to be comma-separated?
Fortunately you can use the @query_result_separator argument to do just that. You can use this argument to specify any separator (as long as it’s a char(1)).