I have a number like : 12345.678
I want it to be like : 12,345 ( removing the rest !)
one solution of adding thousands seperator is :
select convert(varchar(100), cast(12345.678 as money), 1)
which yields : 12,345.68
Now I should remove the .68
I stumbled upon a beautiful solution with parseName :
select parsename(convert(varchar(100), cast(12345.678 as money), 1),2)
which yields : 12,345
Question : is there a better solution for this problem ? ( maybe without involving other functions/string manipulations ? )
There's no easy way of doing this in SQL server 2008. SQL Server 2012 introduced the FORMAT function, which enables you to do the following:
SELECT FORMAT(12345.67, '#,###')
(although this will round the number to 12,346)
Formatting results is something that is not normally in the scope of a database - it's something which should be left to your front-end program/web site/report/spreadsheet etc. However, if you really need to be doing this in SQL Server, I suspect your solution is as close as you're going to get, unless you use CLR Integration to link to the String.Format function from .NET.
If you do go with your solution using parseName, be aware that it may not work internationally (e.g. in parts of Europe where , is used as a decimal separator). This may not be an issue for you, but if it is then you'll need a solution which allows you to explicitly control the formatting.
Parsename is indeed an inventive solution. I have always been using
select replace(convert(varchar,cast(floor(12345.678) as money),1), '.00', '');
-- parsename(convert(varchar,cast(12345.678 as money),1), 2);
Although it's longer. But maybe a direct replacement is faster than a parse routine? In any case, it's not better in the sense that even if it ran 21ns faster, in the greater scheme of things, what are you trying to improve on with such a question?
use floor() to convert it to integer first :
select convert(varchar(100), cast(floor(12345.68) as money), 1)
I support Richards comment that this is normally done in the 'presentation' layer. Why do you need to format this in SQL Server? Are you viewing reports directly in SQL Server? Usually the first thing someone does is copy and paste into Excel.
Anyway If you can always wrap the expression above in a some more string functions:
select replace(
convert(
varchar(100),
cast(floor(12345.68) as money),
1
),'.00','')
There are still possible bugs in this, and again I do not recommend this is done at SQL Server unless you are generating COBOL-like text reports.
Related
I have this piece of code in Oracle which I need to convert into SQL Server to get the same behavior. I have used the REPLACE function. It seems to be working but I just wanted to make sure.
REGEXP_REPLACE(
phonenumber,
'([[:digit:]]{3})([[:digit:]]{3})([[:digit:]]{4})',
'(\1)\2-\3'
) phonenumber
As Martin said in his answer, SQL Server does not have built-in RegEx functionality (and while it has not been suggested here, just to be clear: no, the [...] wildcard of LIKE and PATINDEX is not RegEx). If your data has little to no variation then yes, you can use some combination of T-SQL functions: REPLACE, SUBSTRING, LEFT, RIGHT, CHARINDEX, PATINDEX, FORMATMESSAGE, CONCAT, and maybe one or two others.
However, if the data / input has even a moderate level of complexity, then the built-in T-SQL functions will be at best be cumbersome, and at worst useless. In such cases it's possible to do actual RegEx via SQLCLR (as long as you aren't using Azure SQL Database Single DB or SQL Server 2017+ via AWS RDS), which is (restricted) .NET code running within SQL Server. You can either code your own / find examples here on S.O. or elsewhere, or try a pre-done library such as the one I created, SQL# (SQLsharp), the Free version of which contains several RegEx functions. Please note that SQLCLR, being .NET, is not a POSIX-based RegEx, and hence does not use POSIX character classes (meaning: you will need to use \d for "digits" instead of [:digit:]).
The level of complexity needed in this particular situation is unclear as the example code in the question implies that the data is simple and uniform (i.e. 1112223333) but the example data shown in a comment on the question appears to indicate that there might be dashes and/or spaces in the data (i.e. xxx- xxx xxxx).
If the data truly is uniform, then stick with the pure T-SQL solution provided by #MartinSmith. But, if the data is of sufficient complexity, then please consider the RegEx example below, using a SQLCLR function found in the Free version of my SQL# library (as mentioned earlier), that easily handles the 3 variations of input data and more:
SELECT SQL#.RegEx_Replace4k(tmp.phone,
N'\(?(\d{3})\)?[ .-]*(\d{3})[ .-]*(\d{4})', N'($1)$2-$3',
-1, -- count (-1 == unlimited)
1, -- start at
N'') -- RegEx options
FROM (VALUES (N'8885551212'),
(N'123- 456 7890'),
(N'(777) 555- 4653')
) tmp([phone]);
returns:
(888)555-1212
(123)456-7890
(777)555-4653
The RegEx pattern allows for:
0 or 1 (
3 decimal digits
0 or 1 )
0 or more of , ., or -
3 decimal digits
0 or more of , ., or -
4 decimal digits
NOTE
It was mentioned that the newer Language Extensions might be a better choice than SQLCLR. Language Extensions allow calling R / Python / Java code, hosted outside of SQL Server, via the sp_execute_external_script stored procedure. As the Tutorial: Search for a string using regular expressions (regex) in Java page shows, external scripts are actually not a good choice for many / most uses of RegEx in SQL Server. The main problems are:
Unlike with SQLCLR, the only interface for external scripts is a stored procedure. This means that you can't use any of that functionality inline in a query (SELECT, WHERE, etc).
With external scripts, you pass in the query, work on the results in the external language, and pass back a static result set. This means that compiled code now has to be more specialized (i.e. tightly-coupled) to the particular usage. Changing how the query uses RegEx and/or what columns are returned now requires editing, compiling, testing, and deploying the R / Python / Java code in addition to (and coordinated with!) the T-SQL changes.
I'm sure external scripts are absolutely wonderful, and a better choice than SQLCLR, in certain scenarios. But they certainly do not lend themselves well to the highly varied, and often ad hoc, nature of how RegEx is used (like many / most other functions).
SQL Server does not have native regex support. You would need to use CLR (or as #Lukasz Szozda points out in the comments one of the newer Language Extensions) .
If I have understood the regex correctly though it matches strings of 10 digits and assigns the first 3 to group 1, second 3 to group 2, and last 4 to group 3 and then uses the back references in the expression (\1)\2-\3
You can use built in string functions to do this as below
SELECT CASE
WHEN phonenumber LIKE REPLICATE('[0-9]', 10)
THEN FORMATMESSAGE('(%s)%s-%s',
LEFT(phonenumber, 3),
SUBSTRING(phonenumber, 4, 3),
RIGHT(phonenumber, 4))
ELSE phonenumber
END
You can write SQL function using CLR, that will wrap standard dotnet regex. I have wrote this and you can use it there. It will look this:
DECLARE #SourceText NVARCHAR(MAX) = N'My first line <br /> My second line';
DECLARE #RegexPattern NVARCHAR(MAX) = N'([<]br\s*/[>])';
DECLARE #Replacement NVARCHAR(MAX) = N''
DECLARE #IsCaseSensitive BIT = 0;
SELECT regex.Replace(#SourceText, #RegexPattern, #Replacement, #IsCaseSensitive);
I want to mask certain data either by obfuscation or addition of a masking character.
Using traditional rpad and lpad plus replacing leading digits all have undesired outputs. SQL Server 2016 has a built in data masking function.
See mockup code:
Select mask(ssn,7,4, 'X') from dual;
input 111-11-1234
output: 111-11-XXXX
None.
Not sure what the "undesired outputs" are using rpad and lpad functions, but you could always create a UDF that gives you the correct reformatting of your string. I believe that this works for what you are looking for:
SELECT RPAD(LEFT($1,7),LENGTH($1),'X') FROM (VALUES ('123-44-5678'));
AFAIK Currently there is no such function in Snowflake to mask data.
But this article explains how to use roles and a mapping table to obfuscate PII data.
Just ran into a major headache when concatenating several #varchar(max) variables together to build an email based on several different queries.
For efficiencies sake, I was using several varchars to build the email at once, rather than going through roughly the same query two or three or more times to build it using only one varchar.
This worked, right up until my varchars got to longer than 8000 characters. Then the concatenation of them all into one varchar (which I could shove into the #body parameter of msdb.dbo.sp_send_dbmail) returned "", and even LEN() wouldn't actually give me a length.
Anyhow, I've gotten around this by doing roughly the same queries several times and building the email with only one varchar(max).
TL;DR
I'm not happy with the solution. How could I have appended these varchar(max) variables to each other?
One thing I've hit in the past which may or may not help here: SQL seems to "forget" what datatype its working with when you concatenate varchar(max). Instead of maintaining the MAX, it devolves to conventional varcharnitude, meaning truncation at 8000 characters or so. To get around this, we use the following trick:
Start with
SET #MyMaxVarchar = #aVarcharMaxValue + #SomeString + #SomeOtherString + #etc
and revise like so:
SET #MyMaxVarchar = cast(#aVarcharMaxValue as varchar(max)) + #SomeString + #SomeOtherString + #etc
Again, this may not help with your particular problem, but remembering it might save you major headaches down the road some day.
This may not have happened in your case, but there's a "gotcha" embedded in SQL Management Studio involving VARCHAR(MAX): SQL Studio will only output so many characters in the results grid. You can test this:
SELECT #MyLongVar, LEN(#MyLongVar)
You may find that the length of the actual data returned (most text editors can give you this) is less than the length of the data stored in the variable.
The fix is in Tools | Options | Query Results | SQL Server | Results to Grid; increase Maximum Characters Retrieved | Non XML data to some very large number. Unfortunately the maximum is 65,535, which may not be enough.
If your problem does not involve outputting the variable's value in SQL Studio, please disregard.
I have found that MS SQL silently does NOTHING when attempting to concatentate a string to a NULL value. therefore this solution always works for me:
UPDATE myTable
SET isNull(myCol, '') += 'my text'
WHERE myColumnID = 9999
I have recently taken on a project in which I need to integrate with PHP/SQL Server. I am looking for the quickest and easiest function to prevent SQL injection on SQL Server as I prefer MySQL and do not anticipate many more SQL Server related projects.
Is this function sufficient?
$someVal = mssql_escape($_POST['someVal']);
$query = "INSERT INTO tblName SET field = $someVal";
mssql_execute($query);
function mssql_escape($str) {
return str_replace("'", "''", $str);
}
If not, what additional steps should I take?
EDIT:
I am running on a Linux server - sqlsrv_query() only works if your hosting environment is windows
The best option: do not use SQL statements that get concatenated together - use parametrized queries.
E.g. do not create something like
string stmt = "INSERT INTO dbo.MyTable(field1,field2) VALUES(" + value1 + ", " + value2 + ")"
or something like that and then try to "sanitize" it by replacing single quotes or something - you'll never catch everything, someone will always find a way around your "safe guarding".
Instead, use:
string stmt = "INSERT INTO dbo.MyTable(field1,field2) VALUES(#value1, #value2)";
and then set the parameter values before executing this INSERT statement. This is really the only reliable way to avoid SQL injection - use it!
UPDATE: how to use parametrized queries from PHP - I found something here - does that help at all?
$tsql = "INSERT INTO DateTimeTable (myDate, myTime,
myDateTimeOffset, myDatetime2)
VALUES (?, ?, ?, ?)";
$params = array(
date("Y-m-d"), // Current date in Y-m-d format.
"15:30:41.987", // Time as a string.
date("c"), // Current date in ISO 8601 format.
date("Y-m-d H:i:s.u") // Current date and time.
);
$stmt = sqlsrv_query($conn, $tsql, $params);
So it seems you can't use "named" parameters like #value1, #value2, but instead you just use question marks ? for each parameter, and you basically just create a parameter array which you then pass into the query.
This article Accessing SQL Server Databases with PHP might also help - it has a similar sample of how to insert data using the parametrized queries.
UPDATE: after you've revealed that you're on Linux, this approach doesn't work anymore. Instead, you need to use an alternate library in PHP to call a database - something like PDO.
PDO should work both on any *nix type operating system, and against all sorts of databases, including SQL Server, and it supports parametrized queries, too:
$db = new PDO('your-connection-string-here');
$stmt = $db->prepare("SELECT priv FROM testUsers WHERE username=:username AND password=:password");
$stmt->bindParam(':username', $user);
$stmt->bindParam(':password', $pass);
$stmt->execute();
No, it's not sufficient. To my knowledge, string replacement can never really be sufficient in general (on any platform).
To prevent SQL injection, all queries need to be parameterized - either as parameterized queries or as stored procedures with parameters.
In these cases, the database calling library (i.e. ADO.NET and SQL Command) sends the parameters separately from the query and the server applies them, which eliminates the ability for the actual SQL to be altered in any way. This has numerous benefits besides injection, which include code page issues and date conversion issues - for that matter any conversions to string can be problematic if the server does not expect them done the way the client does them.
I partially disagree with other posters. If you run all your parameters through a function that double the quotes, this should prevent any possible injection attack. Actually in practice the more frequent problem is not deliberate sabotague but queries that break because a value legitimately includes a single quote, like a customer named "O'Hara" or a comment field of "Don't call Sally before 9:00". Anyway, I do escapes like this all the time and have never had a problem.
One caveat: On some database engines, there could be other dangerous characters besides a single quote. The only example I know is Postgres, where the backslash is magic. In this case your escape function must also double backslashes. Check the documentation.
I have nothing against using prepared statements, and for simple cases, where the only thing that changes is the value of the parameter, they are an excellent solution. But I routinely find that I have to build queries in pieces based on conditions in the program, like if parameter X is not null then not only do I need to add it to the where clause but I also need an additional join to get to the value I really need to test. Prepared statements can't handle this. You could, of course, build the SQL in pieces, turn it into a prepared statement, and then supply the parameters. But this is just a pain for no clear gain.
These days I mostly code in Java that allows functions to be overloaded, that is, have multiple implementations depending on the type of the passed in parameter. So I routine write a set of functions that I normally name simply "q" for "quote", that return the given type, suitably quoted. For strings, it doubles any quote marks, then slaps quote marks around the whole thing. For integers it just returns the string representation of the integer. For dates it converts to the JDBC (Java SQL) standard date format, which the driver is then supposed to convert to whatever is needed for the specific database being used. Etc. (On my current project I even included array as a passed in type, which I convert to a format suitable for use in an IN clause.) Then every time I want to include a field in a SQL statement, I just write "q(x)". As this is slapping quotes on when necessary, I don't need the extra string manipulation to put on quotes, so it's probably just as easy as not doing the escape.
For example, vulnerable way:
String myquery="select name from customer where customercode='"+custcode+"'";
Safe way:
String myquery="select name from customer where customercode="+q(custcode);
The right way is not particularly more to type than the wrong way, so it's easy to get in a good habit.
String replacement to escape quotes IS sufficient to prevent SQL injection attack vectors.
This only applies to SQL Server when QUOTED_IDENTIFIER is ON, and when you don't do something stoopid to your escaped string, such as truncating it or translating your Unicode string to an 8-bit string after escaping. In particular, you need to make sure QUOTED_IDENTIFIER is set to ON. Usually that's the default, but it may depend on the library you are using in PHP to access MSSQL.
Parameterization is a best practice, but there is nothing inherently insecure about escaping quotes to prevent SQL injection, with due care.
The rel issue with escaping strings is not the efficacy of the replacement, it is the potential for forgetting to do the replacement every time.
That said, your code escapes the value, but does not wrap the value in quotes. You need something like this instead:
function mssql_escape($str) {
return "N'" + str_replace("'", "''", $str) + "'";
}
The N above allows you to pass higher Unicode characters. If that's not a concern (i.e., your text fields are varchar rather than nvarchar), you can remove the N.
Now, if you do this, there are some caveats:
You need to make DAMNED SURE you call mssql_escape for every string value. And therein lies the rub.
Dates and GUID values also need escaping in the same manner.
You should validate numeric values, or at least escape them as well using the same function (MSSQL will cast the string to the appropriate numeric type).
Again, like others have said, parameterized queries are safer--not because escaping quotes doesn't work (it does except as noted above), but because it's easier to visually make sure you didn't forget to escape something.
In Management Studio, you can right click on the tables group to create a filter for the table list. Has anyone figured out a way to include multiple tables in the filter? For example, I'd like all tables with "br_*" and "tbl_*" to show up.
Anyone know how to do this?
No, you can't do this. When we first got Management Studio I've tried every possible combination of everything you could think of: _, %, *, ", ', &&, &, and, or, |, ||, etc...
You might be able to roll your own addon to SMSS that would allow you to do what you are looking for:
The Black Art of Writing a SQL Server Management Studio 2005 Add-In
Extend Functionality in SQL Server 2005 Management Studio with Add-ins
The first one is specifically for searching and displaying all schema objects with a given name so you might be able to expand upon that for what you are looking for.
I'm using SQL Server Management Studio v17.1 and it has a SQL injection bug in it's filter construction, so you can actually escape default
tbl.name like '%xxx%'
and write your own query (with some limitations). For example to filter tables that are ending with "_arch", "_hist", "_purge" I used following filter value
_arch') and RIGHT(tbl.name, 5) != N'purge' and RIGHT(tbl.name, 4) != N'hist' and not(tbl.name like N'bbb
You can use SQL Server Profiler to see the constructed query and adjust it as needed.
Not sure if this same bug is available in previous SQL Management Studio versions or when it will be fixed, but for now I'm happy with the result.
I've used Toad for SQL Server (freeware version) which has very nice filtering options.
At first it looks like it could use a CONTAINS query (e.g. "br_*" OR "tbl_*"), but it doesn't seem to. It seems to only support a value that is then passed into a LIKE clause (e.g. 'app' becomes '%app%').
The "sql injection" method still works (v17.5), but with a twist:
zzzz' or charindex('pattern1', name) > 0 or charindex('pattern2', name) > 0 or name like 'zzzz
(I used the 'zzzz' to bypass the '%')
It doesn´t work if '_' or '%' is used in the patterns (or anywhere on your code), because it will automatically be replaced by '[_]' or '[%]' before evaluation.
As others have said, you cannot do this in SQL Server Management Studio (up and including 2014).
The following query will give you a filtered list of tables, if this is all you need:
SELECT
CONCAT(TABLE_SCHEMA, '.', TABLE_NAME) AS TABLE_SCHEMA_AND_NAME,
TABLE_SCHEMA,
TABLE_NAME
FROM
INFORMATION_SCHEMA.TABLES
WHERE
TABLE_SCHEMA IN ('X', 'Y', 'Z') -- schemas go here
ORDER BY
TABLE_SCHEMA,
TABLE_NAME;
The SQL injection method still works (somewhat) as of SSMS 2017 v17.8.1, although it puts brackets around the % symbol, so it will interpret those literally.
If you're using the Name->Contains filter, Profiler shows:
... AND dtb.name LIKE N'%MyDatabase1%')
So, in the Name->Contains field: MyDatabase1') OR (dtb.name LIKE 'MyDatabase2 should do it for simple cases.
This is old I know, but it's good to know that it can works if you input just entering the "filter" text. Skip * or % or any other standard search characters, just enter br_ or tbl_ or whatever you want to filter on.
Your in luck, I just conquered that feat, although my success is small because you can filter by schema which would allow you see more than 1 table but you have to type the filter text in each time you want to change it.