Problem

Imagine a database where you want to know how many times a certain column contains a special character. The reason I had to do this was that I needed to know the impact of an export interface that wasn’t working properly with special characters.

But as lazy as I am when it comes to doing repetitive tasks, I had to find a way could easily get all columns with special characters in a data set without a lot of hassle.

Problem

The business uses a database that is 350 GB database in size and has only one data file and one transaction log file. The previous DBA didn’t increase the amount of data files which lead to a large data file. Due to the size of the data file, I got into trouble with the performance, and restoring the database wasn’t a walk in the park either. So how can split a large data file into smaller data files?