Another absolute gem that a coworker of mine, Scott Fitzpatrick, found as part of our continuing database optimization was how to compare character fields fast if doing a “loose” comparison. Say we wanted to find a row where the field was O’BRIEN but we wanted to match on OBRIEN. We have previously been using a [...]

Thanks to Dan Venor and Scott Fitzpatrick and a little help isolating the ASCII Character values here are a two functions for use with inline MSSQL queries to strip non-alphanumeric and non-numeric characters in character fields respectively. This comes in handy if you’re using older versions of mssql that do not have regex (regular expression) [...]