t-sql

How to Select a Subset of Columns from a Stored Procedure’s Result Set (T-SQL)

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Have you ever run a stored procedure, only to be overwhelmed at the number of columns returned? Maybe you only needed one or two columns, but it presented you with way too many columns for your needs on this particular occasion.

Fortunately, there’s a little trick you can use to retrieve selected columns from a stored procedure. This enables you to get just the columns you need.

And the best part is, it doesn’t involve having to create temporary tables and shuffling the data around.

All you need to do is pass your stored procedure to the OPENROWSET() function.

The same concept can be applied to the OPENQUERY() function.

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How to Fix “profile name is not valid” When Updating a Database Mail Profile in SQL Server (T-SQL)

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If you’re getting a “profile name is not valid” error when updating a Database Mail profile in SQL Server, it could be that you’ve forgotten to provide the profile ID.

When you update a Database Mail profile with the sysmail_update_profile_sp stored procedure, you need to include the profile ID if you want to update the profile name.

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How to Enable RPC Out using T-SQL

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You may occasionally need to enable the “RPC Out” option on a linked server. This option enables RPC to the given server.

RPC stands for Remote Procedure Calls. RPC is basically a stored procedure being run remotely from Server 1 to linked Server 2.

If you don’t enable this and you try to execute a stored procedure on the linked server, you’ll probably get error Msg 7411 telling you that the server is not configured for RPC.

Anyway, you can enable/disable this option either using SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) or with T-SQL.

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2 Ways to Create a Database on a Linked Server using T-SQL

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One way of creating a database on a linked server, is to simply jump over to that server and create it locally.

But you’d probably feel a bit cheated if I included that as one of the “2 ways” to create a database on a linked server.

Also, while that option is fine if you’re able and willing to do it, this article shows you how to do it remotely using T-SQL, without having to jump over to the local server. Plus you might find this technique quicker than jumping over to the other server.

Both of the “2 ways” involve the EXECUTE statement (which can also be shortened to EXEC). We can use this statement to execute code on the linked server, and that includes creating a database on it.

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How SET ROWCOUNT Works in SQL Server

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In SQL Server, you can use SET ROWCOUNT to limit the rows returned by a query.

The way it works is that it causes SQL Server to stop processing the query after the specified number of rows are returned.

It’s similar to the TOP() clause, but with the difference that SET ROWCOUNT is set outside of the query, and will affect all subsequent queries.

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3 Ways to Get the Schema of a Result Set in SQL Server

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Sometimes when you run a query in SQL Server, you might want to know what the underlying data type of each column is, its precision, length, whether or not its nullable, etc.

If you’re querying just one table, you can get this sort of data with procedures such as sp_columns. But if your query runs across many tables, this could get unwieldy very quickly.

Fortunately there are several ways you can go about getting such metadata for a result set in SQL Server.

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