Thursday, October 3, 2024

How to replace NULL with Empty String in SQL Server? ISNULL() vs COALESCE() Examples

We often need to replace NULL values with empty String or blank in SQL e.g. while concatenating String. In SQL Server, when you concatenate a NULL String with another non-null String the result is NULL, which means you lose the information you already have. To prevent this, you can replace NULL with empty String while concatenating. There are two ways to replace NULL with blank values in SQL Server, function ISNULL(), and COALESCE(). Both functions replace the value you provide when the argument is NULL like ISNULL(column, '') will return empty String if the column value is NULL.

Wednesday, October 2, 2024

Difference between char, varchar, nchar and nvarchar data types in SQL Server? Example

What is the difference between char and varchar in SQL, followed by nchar and nvarchar, is one of the popular SQL interview questions, and surprisingly not every programmer knows this basic difference. If you go with the name, which you should, then you can figure out that char is a fixed-length data type while varchar should be a variable-length data type. Though all char, varchar, nchar, and nvarchar are used to store text or String data there are subtle differences between them. As I said char is fixed length, which means a variable or a column like Zipcode char(10) will take only 10 bytes to store data, including space.

Thursday, September 26, 2024

How to Find Duplicate values in a Table? SQL GROUP BY and Having Example| Leetcode Solution

Hello guys, if you are wondering how to find duplicate values in a table then don't worry, there are many ways to find duplicate rows or values from a given table. For example, you can use the GROUP BY and HAVING clause in SQL with count function to find all the rows which has same values for a particular column and then filter out rows where count is just one, I mean unique values. This way you can find all the duplicate from a given table. Using group by you can create groups and if your group has more than 1 element it means it's kind of duplicate.