Month: October 2014

Recently, I have been coding T-SQL Stored Procedures in a SQL Server database when I ran across something which should be easy to do, but probably wasn’t, that ended up actually being easy.  Specifically, I had to find the most commonly occurring item in a column in a table.

For example if I had a People table with a Name column with the values: Paul, Dave, Paul.  Now, I want to find the value “Paul” because it occurs most frequently.

Obviously, my first thought was to do:

select Name, count(*)

from People

group by Name

order by count(*) desc

which would give me 2 rows:

Paul 2

Dave 1

Then, I could add a ‘top 1’ to the select to only get:

Paul 2

 

However, this is not what I want.  I don’t want the ‘2’.  So, I played around with the SQL a bit and came up with:

select top 1 Name

from People
group by Name
order by Count(*) desc

This SQL gave me exactly what I wanted: ‘Paul’

So, it actually turned out to be easy!  I just wanted to share this with everybody in case you run across the same situation and need a good solution.

 

I am running Windows 7 and Google Chrome.  Recently, I updated Chrome to the latest version, 38.  After that I had nothing but problems with Chrome.   New tabs wouldn’t open, pop-up windows would be blank and hang, etc..  It was so bad, that I started using Internet Explorer again!

Finally, when I had some free time I Googled a bit, I found a fix.

The fix is to set the Compatibility Mode to Windows 7.  To do this, open the Properties (right-click on icon on Chrome icon on desktop), click on the Compatibility tab (see screen shot below), check the ‘Run this program in compatibility mode for:’ checkbox, select ‘Windows 7’ in the drop-down.  Note: you can also works for Windows Vista, Windows XP, and many other versions.

 

Since making this change, I have not had any problems using Chrome.

 

To find out what instances of SQL Server are installed on a Windows PC:

1. Open a Command window (In Windows 7, click Start button, enter: cmd <enter> in ‘Search programs and file’ field).

2. Enter: SQLCMD – L <enter>  into the command window.  Note that the ‘L’ in the -L must be a capital L.

Here is an example from my PC: