Yesterday I presented at SQLSaturday #162.
I also wanted to answer a question from an audience member after the session about how to generate YYYYMMDD strings to represent yesterday's date in order to append to a backup file name. In this case because we're probably not worried about performance (you're performing this calculation once), we can just use string conversion (see this blog post for a more detailed discussion about doing things like stripping time from datetime at high volume).
-- In SQL Server 2005, 2008 or 2008 R2, you can say: SELECT [filename] = 'Backup' + CONVERT(CHAR(8), DATEADD(DAY, -1, GETDATE()), 112); -- In SQL Server 2012, you can use a slightly more self-documenting method: SELECT [filename] = 'Backup' + FORMAT(DATEADD(DAY, -1, GETDATE()), 'yyyyMMdd');
I was really impressed with how this event was run – it was super organized and I had a great time, so kudos to Mark and Lorraine Broadbent and everyone else who helped by speaking, volunteering and sponsoring.
Today I was able to take a walk around "The Backs" (the walkways along the river behind all the famous colleges here), then went to Castle Mound with Buck Woody & family, then Scott and I took a train to Ely to see the 4th largest cathedral in Europe. A good day. Pictures here:
Thanks Zuzana!
Thank you. It was a really great presentation. Will go and play with dates now.
Steve, sure, if all your code is listed out within the job step. If you're using more complicated logic you're probably using stored procedures and – especially if you need to call them outside the context of Agent as well – the tokens don't help much. 🙂
even easier use Job Tokens :-
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms175575(v=sql.105).aspx