How can some letter hide in SQL Server? - sql-server

I want to some column masking in sql column.
How can I do sql command?


Assuming you are using SQL Server 2008 or later, we can try using REPLICATE with SUBSTRING:
SELECT
'**' + SUBSTRING(col, 3, 2) + REPLICATE('*', LEN(col) - 4) AS mask
FROM yourTable;
Demo
A nicer way to handle this would be to make use of regular expressions, but SQL Server does not really support a regex replace. So I offer this as an alternative.

Related

Why does SQL Server HASHBYTES work differently from Oracle STANDARD_HASH?

Any idea why the two hashing functions in SQL Server and Oracle yield different results when hashing the non-breaking space character?
Oracle select standard_hash('a ', 'MD5') from dual; results in 25EF28EB5A5BE667C6222418E9E27E8E and doesn't match SQL select HASHBYTES ('MD5','a '); results in CE8F03020C81133B3A082F8051EB9FF6. Note the space after the input 'a' is a non-breaking space character.
Is there any good source that can lay out the differences?

This appears to be a character set or "collation" issue, where Oracle is in UTF-8 and SQL Server is in Latin 1252. My solution was to CONVERT the value to Windows Latin-1252 in Oracle before calculating the hash: select STANDARD_HASH(CONVERT('a ','WE8MSWIN1252'), 'MD5') from dual.
To find my collation/character set I did SELECT collation_name FROM sys.databases WHERE name = 'MY_DB_NAME'; in SQL Server and select * from nls_database_parameters where parameter='NLS_CHARACTERSET'; in Oracle.

First of all you need to establish which one is actually yielding "different" results:
Using your favourite search engine to find online hash generators and testing results.
External Resources
https://passwordsgenerator.net/md5-hash-generator/ - 99020CB24BD13238D907C65CC2B57C03
https://www.md5hashgenerator.com/ - 99020cb24bd13238d907c65cc2b57c03
https://www.miraclesalad.com/webtools/md5.php - 99020cb24bd13238d907c65cc2b57c03
SQL Server
select HASHBYTES ('MD5', 'a ')
SQL Server 2014 SP3 (12.0.6024.0) - 0x99020CB24BD13238D907C65CC2B57C03
SQL Server 2019 (15.0.2080.9) - 0x99020CB24BD13238D907C65CC2B57C03
Oracle (using https://dbfiddle.uk/)
select standard_hash('a ', 'MD5') from dual;
Oracle 21c - 0x99020CB24BD13238D907C65CC2B57C03
Oracle 18c - 0x99020CB24BD13238D907C65CC2B57C03
Oracle 11gR2 - "ORA-00904: "STANDARD_HASH": invalid identifier"
Conclusion
You can see that your Oracle produced answer differs even from other Oracle answers. What version of Oracle are you running? What other options are set, such as collation etc.?

Alternative to using FORMAT in SQL Server 2008 R2

I created a SELECT using the following in SQL Server 2012:
SELECT
CAST(FORMAT(CONVERT(DATETIME, date_time, 127), 'yyyy-MM-ddTHH:mm:ssZ') AS NVARCHAR(20)) TimeStamp,
FROM myTable
This will result in a date formatted like 2019-03-15T13:25:19Z
How can I achieve the same result using SQL Server 2008 R2 or older?

You can achieve this far more easily by just using CONVERT:
SELECT CONVERT(varchar(19),GETDATE(),127) + 'Z';
As I mentioned in my comment FORMAT is actually an awful function, it performs terribly. I posted an answer to another question earlier today on just how badly it does compared to a CONVERT. Don't just use this expression on your 2008- servers, replace the FORMAT expression on your 2012+ servers with this one too.

I think this does what you want:
select replace(convert(varchar(255), getdate(), 120), ' ', 'T') + 'Z'
Code 127 returns milliseconds, which you do not seem to want, so 120 seems more appropriate.

Convert Access query to SQL

I am converting Access query to SQL Server.
I want to convert below lines to SQL
1. Format (210.6, "Standard")
2. Format (210.6, "#,##0.00")
How do i convert it to SQL query.
I have tried with below, but still not able to find the solution.
For the first query, i found below solution, which is correct
1. CONVERT(varchar, CAST(tSRO.OutputF11 AS money), 1)
Now, for second query, i do not know what i have to do.

From SQL Server 2012+ you can use FORMAT:
SELECT FORMAT(210.6, '#,##0.00') -- 210.60
SELECT FORMAT(1210.6, '#,##0.00') -- 1,210.60
LiveDemo
SQL Server before 2012:
SELECT REPLACE(CONVERT(VARCHAR,CONVERT(MONEY, 1210.6),1),'.00','') -- 1,210.60
LiveDemo2
Warning:
This operation is pure for presentation layer and should be done in application.

Doing a linguistic sort in SQL Server 2008

In Oracle, in order to do a linguistic sort, suppose with arabic characters, I use following :
ALTER SESSION SET nls_sort='arabic'
How can I achieve linguistic sorting in SQL Server 2008 ?

SQL Server has the concept of collations which affect ordering and comparison operations.
If your data is configured using a different collation to the one you require, you can force a specific one to sort by in your ORDER BY statement like this:
SELECT *
FROM Table
ORDER BY TextColumn COLLATE Arabic_CI_AS

sp_generate_inserts for SQL Server 2008

I've been using Narayana Vyas Kondreddi's excellent stored procedure sp_generate_inserts http://vyaskn.tripod.com/code/generate_inserts.txt in a SQL Server 2005 database.
But after moving to SQL Server 2008 I get weird results where a long whitespace is inserted after UNIQUEIDENTIFIER values:
INSERT INTO [BannerGroups]([Id], [DescriptionText], [Width], [Height])
VALUES('BFCD0173-9432-47D1-84DF-8AB3FB40BF76 ', 'Example', 145, NULL)
Anyone know how to fix this?

Appears to be this section, just over half way down:
WHEN #Data_Type IN ('uniqueidentifier')
THEN
'COALESCE('''''''' + REPLACE(CONVERT(char(255),RTRIM(' + #Column_Name + ')),'''''''','''''''''''')+'''''''',''NULL'')'
See it's converting to a CHAR(255) which means the value is being padded out to 255 characters. Change that to VARCHAR instead and it should be fine as that will not pad the values out with spaces.

Since SQL Server 2008 we can generate the INSERT scripts via Generate Script utility itself.
For more detailed answer check out - What is the best way to auto-generate INSERT statements for a SQL Server table?

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