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Count characters in SQL 2000

Author

Topic

superhero
Yak Posting Veteran

52 Posts

Posted - 2007-01-26 : 04:44:20

Hi Everyone

I'm developing in VB.net 2 with SQL 2000 Enterprize.

The company I work for does off-site record storage. We have a lot of indexers that physically type and index these files manually on our system. They get paid per character they type.

I would like to give the users a way of checking how many character they have typed. Right now I do a simple "Select field1, field2 from indexdata where indexername = John and indexdate > 01/01/2007 and indexdate < 01/02/2007". I then loop through the records, adding everyting to a string variable and doing a len(stringvariable) in vb. This works great, no problems at all. It just takes long. 'Cause I have to transfer all the data to the users' pc just to count the characters. The indexers can't type a lot of blank spaces - my software checks for that, so whatever is in the DB is the correct characters. I just simply need to count them!

I know in SQL you have the COUNT function that can return number of rows. Does anyone know of a way of letting the SQL server count the characters and simply return an integer to the user? It would just speed things up a lot!

Thanks

SwePeso
Patron Saint of Lost Yaks

30421 Posts

Posted - 2007-01-26 : 04:48:12

[code]SELECT SUM(LEN(Field1) + LEN(Field2)) AS Characters
FROM IndexData
WHERE IndexerName = 'John'
AND IndexDate >= '20070101'
AND IndexDate < '20070201'[/code]

Peter Larsson
Helsingborg, Sweden