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PatReplace8K

The Voice of the DBA

Change Approvals

Part of a developer's or DBA's career is getting their work released to some system where others can use the system. Some of us may do this more than others, but we all usually have some role, whether in packaging changes up or actually pushing the button that runs a script or copies files to some live server. This can be an exciting and stressful time, depending on how you feel about the quality of the work.

Releasing software often isn't something done in a vacuum. Even in the highly agile, DevOps companies like Amazon and Facebook where developers release code many times a day, there is often some sort of approval process, whether implicit or explicit, before code goes out. Even if it's just a peer that code reviews something, or a business person that examines a test version and pronounces it correct, another person often weighs in on our changes.

That's not always the case, as I know in emergencies, some of us make quick decisions and change or run code that only we have examined. I'd hope that's the exception, rather than the rule, with most database changes.

Today I'm curious. Who approves your database changes? Is there a formal process? An informal one? Does the person making the decision even understand the code or do they depend on you to have written and tested solid T-SQL?

It's been said that the person closest to the work is often the best person to judge if it should be released, but that's only partially true. Deploying code is often disruptive. It introduces change, which customers may or may not like. There may be good reasons to release at discrete intervals, rather than whenever the developer things things are working. This may change with heavy use of feature flags or feature toggles, but in general, code releases are interruptions and we want to limit them.

Unless something is broken, in which case, we often want the change as quick as it can be released. Does that mean we want a different change process? Let us know today.

Steve Jones from SQLServerCentral.com

Join the debate, and respond to today's editorial on the forums

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Question of the Day

Today's Question (by Steve Jones):

What does SQL Server 2016 do to make In-Memory Optimized operations run faster?

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Yesterday's Question of the Day

Yesterday's Question (by Steve Jones):

What does this tell me in SQL Server 2016?

 SELECT OBJECTPROPERTY(OBJECT_ID('order'),'TableIsPinned')

Answer: This tells me nothing as tables cannot be pinned in SQL Server 2016

Explanation:

Prior to SQL Server 7, we could pin tables in memory with dbcc pintable. This option remains, but it does not work from SQL Server 2005+.

Ref: OBJECTPROPERTY() - click here

» Discuss this question and answer on the forums

Featured Script

PatReplace8K

Alan Burstein from SQLServerCentral.com

UPDATE (March 20, 2017): Discovered and resolved a bug. When @replace was a space ( char(32) ) the function would just remove characters that matched the pattern instead of replacing them with a space. This has been resolved.

You don't need Regex for that!

With the right tools you don't need Regex, CLRs or other 3rd party tools to deal with complex string parsing in T-SQL. There are a number of tools on SSC that will help you do so using only T-SQL.

Enter patreplace8K. Patreplace 8K leverages the power of PATINDEX and therefore requires SQL Server 2008 or higher. Even if you never use it for developing SQL feel free to use it as yet another example of what you can do with a tally table.

This function mimics some of the functionality of RegexReplace. Patreplace8K requires Cross Apply to be used against the values in a table. See the comment section of the code for a few examples of how to use this function against a variable or a table.

Note that you can use this function to remove characters by setting the @replace value to ''. You can do this even faster, however using Patexclude8K. You can also double the speed of this function using Adam Mechanic's make_parallel function.

To better understand the techniques used in this function see:

The "Numbers" or "Tally" Table: What it is and how it replaces a loop

Understanding and Using APPLY

How to Make Scalar UDFs Run Faster (SQL Spackle)

Next-Level Parallel Plan Forcing: An Alternative to 8649

Feel free to direct any questions about this function to me at via the SSC forumns control panel, AlanJBurstein@Gmail.com

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