Towering Queries

 I recently ran across a case where a time value was stored as an Int, with the idea that the first two numbers are the hours, second two the minutes, and third two the seconds. This is all well and good if the hours are double digits (e.g. 144415), as you can just split the string every two characters. If the hours are single digit (e.g. 93251) doing that won't give you the right result. You'll wind up splitting out "93", "25", 1" when what you really want is "09", "32", "51". You also run into this stuff sometimes when you're trying to left-pad a string for a year, month, or date to a pretty format. None of these cases are particularly compelling, and there are probably other solutions for these sorts of issues, but what I DO want to share with you, is a couple ways you can left-pad a string with characters.  FWIW, I've tried doing left-padding with the FORMAT function, and maybe I just suck with it, but I haven&#

 By default, powershell scripts failing in a SQL agent job, won't stop the agent job. In otherwords, things will go wrong in your script, and SQL Agent will happily move on to the next step in the job. That is not so good. The options at your disposal would seem to be: Exit 1 Write-Error $ErrorActionPreference="Stop" throw Stuff that doesn't work The first two options might come to mind, but they don't work. Details below. Exit exit 1  (or any code != 0) would seem to give the calling application (Agent) the info that the task failed, by it's return code. However Agent doesn't respect this. So that's not an option. Write-Error Write-Error stops execution when you run a powershell script through a powershell window, but again, for SQL Agent, it doesn't pick up on that. Yes, it will stop the script, but Agent will happily continue to the next step Stuff that Works To get Agent to recognize a powershell script failure, and actually fail the agent job,