SQL Server provides a function HashBytes function that returns the SHA1 , MD2 , MD4 and few other hash value of the specified input. How to return the SHA1 hash value of a string in SQL Server ? Just pass the ‘SHA1’ as the first parameter and the input as second parameter value to the HashBytes function to get the SHA1 hash value.

There are times when you get an error stating “Saving changes is not permitted. The changes you have made require the following tables to be dropped and re-created. You have either made changes to a table that can’t be re-created or enabled the option Prevent saving changes that require the table to be re-created.” You can easily resolve this issue by following the steps mentioned…

You can use the RETURN statement to discontinue the execution of a the T-SQL batch statement. For example , you want to display the Employees whose MaritalStatus is Divorced. You donot want the SQL Statements following it to be executed if this condition doesn’t match. You can use the IF NOT EXISTS and use the RETURN statement as shown in this example. The second statement…

You can use inner join to get the result of two tables that match the criteria. For example , assume that you have a Person table and a Phone Number table where every person would have 0 or more phone number associated to him and you wish to get the person records who have at least one phone number. Here’s the query on how to…

If you are looking at writing a query to sleep for or WAIT for a certain amount of time before the query execution can begin , you can use the WAITFOR command. For example , if you want to wait for 1 minute , the query or command for the same will be this.

There are times when you want to connect to a SQL Server instance that is running on a different port number than default port (1433). How to specify a port number when connecting to a SQL Server instance in SQL Management Studio ? Just specify the SQL Server instance that you are connecting to along with the port number with comma as delimiter. For example…

If you need to get the list of all tables from a SQL Server database , you can query the information_schema.tables by specifying the TABLE_TYPE parameter search criteria to “BASE TABLE’. How to get the list of all tables from a SQL Server database ?

You want the results of the query to be displayed in a sorted order based on some query. In this case , you use the ORDER BY clause in the query by specifying the column on which the sort to work. For example , you want to sort the Departments table in the database by the column DepartmentName. Here’s how the query looks like This…

You can find out if the index exists for a table by querying the sys.indexes table as shown in this blog post’s code sample. How do you check if an index exists in a table? This will list out all the indexes of the table.