This editorial was originally published on April 18, 2014. It is being republished as Steve is rehearsing for tomorrow's SQL in the City.

A friend recently was asked to give a presentation on their career to a group of 12 year olds. It was a challenge to engage the students, and my friend was surprised that very few of the kids were interested in technology. I was disappointed as well since I think this is a great career choice, and worth a little investigation, especially at that age.

It's hard to convince people to enter this business if they don't have any interest, but if they do, I'm wondering what you might tell them. Today I'd like you to think about your words of wisdom to someone interested in your job.

What would you tell someone that you wish you knew early on in your career?

You might impart some hints about how to approach technology. You might give them ideas on how to build skills faster or better? However for me, I'd tell them two things.

First, you can't underestimate the value of networking, no matter what field you enter. Whether that's technology, medicine, law, or anything else, networking will help you. Learn to make contacts and interact with people.

Second, learn what you don't like to do. Experiment with the technologies, practice the jobs, and understand what you don't like. You might not find something you have a passion for, but I'd certainly encourage you not to enter a field that you just don't enjoy.

Join the debate, and respond to today's editorial on the forums

STRING_SPLIT() requires a delimiter of exactly one character, so you cannot pass in an empty string (answer 1) or NULL (answer 2) as the delimiter.
However if you can modify your string such that every original character is followed or preceded by a new known character, you can split on that character. That's essentially what answer 3 does. Here's what happens:

1. CAST(@A AS NVARCHAR) replaces the byte-per-character @A with a Unicode two-byte-per character representation of the same string. Importantly, the input string consists entirely of characters which map directly to some of the first 256 Unicode characters.

2. CAST(... AS VARBINARY) tells SQL Server to treat this Unicode string as a sequence of bytes. In SQL Server, that's little-endian, so it becomes '0x410042004300440045004600' -- note the alternation of our desired values and 00 -- because these characters map to low Unicode characters, the most significant byte is always 0.

3. CAST(... AS VARCHAR) converts the binary value, byte-by-byte into a new string. If you select this value in SQL Server, it will return 'A', but it actually holds 'A{0}B{0}C{0}D{0}E{0}F{0}' where {0} represents the 0 byte values from the varbinary.

Now you can use char(0) as the delimiter to split the resulting string and get the results you're after.

Reference:

STRING_SPLIT: click here

Unicode Code Charts: click here (NB the characters which map to the first 256 bytes of Unicode and hence would work with this trick are under European Scripts > Latin > Basic Latin and Latin-1 Supplement)

» Discuss this question and answer on the forums