Most of the “N most important / least understood / secret / otherwise tittliating [whatever]” posts I read tend to be search-bait with the content lacking in actual relevance and usefulness, but I ran across this post today that I think would actually be worthwhile for anyone who writes SQL Server queries to read and find useful nuggets.
Quickly, now, have you ever used all of the following functions? Some of them could usefully turn up in your code several times a year, if only you knew about them:
BINARY_CHECKSUM()
SIGN()
COLUMNPROPERTY()
DATALENGTH()
ASCII(), CHAR(),UNICODE(),NCHAR()
NULLIF()
PARSENAME()
STUFF()
REVERSE()
GETUTCDATE()
Read about them here.
