SQL SERVER - Display Line Numbers In Query Editor Window

We can display line numbers in query editor window . Line numbers are useful for navigating code in SQL Server Management Studio

Go to menu Tools >> select Options >> Click Text Editor >> Click All Languages >> Click General. Select Line numbers in Display section.

To view line numbers in only some programming languages, select Line Numbers in the appropriate folder.

It should be noted that, document will not be printed with line numbers by turning on line numbering. For line numbers to print, we must select the Include Line Numbers check box in the Print command on the File menu.

Reference: Enabling Full Screen Mode

SQL SERVER - Add New Column In Existing Table With Default Value

Many times, we need to add new column in our existing database table. Many of us prefer to use a table designer to add new column, I would like to use SQL query to do this operation. If we add new column through designer it will not update the default value for that column and we need to update that column. With the help of following query, we can add new column to our existing table with default value we want to assign to that column without executing update statement.

ALTER TABLE [dbo].[Account]
ADD Active BIT DEFAULT 1 WITH VALUES;

Following is the complete example to test the above SQL statement.

USE [Master]
GO
CREATE DATABASE MyTestDB
GO

USE MyTestDB
GO
CREATE TABLE [dbo].[Account](
 [AccountID] INT IDENTITY(1,1) PRIMARY KEY,
 [AccountNumber] [varchar](6) NULL,
 [BranchName] [varchar](6) NULL,
 [Balance] [numeric](8, 2) NULL
) 
GO

INSERT INTO dbo.Account(AccountNumber,BranchName,Balance)
SELECT '000001','Br001',1202.00
UNION SELECT '000002','Br002',904.00

SELECT * FROM dbo.Account

ALTER TABLE [dbo].[Account]
ADD Active BIT DEFAULT 1 WITH VALUES;

SELECT * FROM dbo.Account

DROP TABLE [dbo].[Account]

USE MASTER
GO
DROP DATABASE MyTestDB

In above example, it will add a new column ‘Active’ with default value 1 for all the rows in table ‘[dbo].[Account]'. The above example shows that we can add new column in existing table with default value in SQL SERVER using ALTER TABLE statement.

SQL SERVER - View full content of a text or varchar(MAX) column

Recently I came across with a problem where I had to debug the dynamic SQL stored in large dynamic SQL varchar datatype variable and could not select in the result grid or print the whole SQL script because of SQL server limitation of displaying maximum number of text when dealing with large dynamic SQL variables.

Therefore, I started to search the web and found one tricky solution. Here I want to share that solution for such kind of problem.

DECLARE @str AS VARCHAR(MAX)
SELECT @str = REPLICATE(CAST('A' AS VARCHAR(MAX)), 65535)

SELECT [processing-instruction(X)] = @str 
FOR XML PATH(''),TYPE

This will convert the dynamic SQL to XML, instead of printing the dynamic SQL to the message tab. XML
The column name [processing-instruction(x)] sends special XML instruction allowing the text to be converted, along with any special characters. XML also keeps the formatting and can store up to 2 GB of data. It should be noted that whatever value you put in parenthesis would be incorporated in the XML tags, in this case “X”. We can strip of the XML tags from the top and bottom of the query text and go ahead with debugging.

Reference: Allow large text to be displayed in as a link