As a part of developing ETL packages, sometimes, I’ve to write T-SQL queries to pull data from SQL server source systems. But before I start doing that, it’s always good to know the version/edition of the source system. Why? because it can determine whether a TSQL operators are available for me to use or not. Case in point, I had a requirements where I could have written a query that uses Pivot & UnPivot operators. So I write a query & it doesn’t work! I spent about 5 minutes trying to debug the code. The code seems OK to me. So I thought of checking the “version”. And there you go, client’s source system was running SQL Server 2000. So that meant, I couldn’t use the Pivot & UnPivot operators.

This was my quick note on how select @@version helps me while I’m TSQL’ing. Next time, I’ll probably check this first, before writing the code. That could save me few minutes 🙂