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Showing posts from April, 2012

Leading zeros in SQL

So at work today, I ran across a SQL stored procedure called 'fixLeadingZeros' that has the below implementation. It's actually much longer than this since it does it for several columns.... and some columns have longer values. In other words, if the field is supposed to have 8 digits, it has 8 statements.  I couldn't help but to feel a bit disgusted from it and had to share it. UPDATE [SomeTable] SET SomeColumn = '0' + [SomeColumn] WHERE len (SomeColumn) =4 UPDATE [SomeTable] SET SomeColumn = '00' + SomeColumn WHERE len (SomeColumn) =3 UPDATE [SomeTable] SET SomeColumn = '000' + SomeColumn WHERE len (SomeColumn) = 2 UPDATE [SomeTable] SET SomeColumn = '0000' + SomeColumn WHERE len (SomeColumn) =1 UPDATE [Some] SET SomeColumn = '00000' WHERE SomeColumn ='' OR SomeColumn is null This could have been done a LOT easier.  If your goal is to update existing columns so that t