Almost all the applications we use have a lot of options. And, sometimes we even stumble across them by accident. Who’s ever heard something like “Normal user don’t even use 5% of Excel capabilities!”?

Other options, we know they exist but because the default value it’s ok (so far) we tend to forget it. It is just sitting there, waiting for the day we want/need to change it.

The oddity

Few days ago I was talking with a friend that show me some “odd behavior” when working with dates on SQL Server.

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If you have been reading my last blog posts, you know that I’m currently working on a SQL code migration from Firebird to SQL Server.

The client provided the scripts with all modules (Stored Procedures, functions, etc) and the steps I’m following (roughly speaking) for converting are:

• Open new query window
• Copy and paste de object code
• Save the file This is how the file look like:
• Run a PowerShell script that does a find and replace based on a hashtable. Apply all the changes and save the file again.
• The file refresh on SSMS This is how the file look like after the find and replace:
• Unicode characters are broken :-(

So…what is happening?

The file that is used to create a new query window has ANSI encoding but when I save the file on the PowerShell script I save it as UTF-8 because the client have comments on the code with unicode characters.

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I’m currently working on a SQL code migration from Firebird to SQL Server and I hit an error that I haven’t seen for some time.

The error message is the following:

Msg 206, Level 16, State 2, Line 4 Operand type clash: datetime2 is incompatible with int

This ringed the bell right away! Somewhere on the code someone was trying to do an arithmetic calculation without using the proper function.

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