Greetings and other Awesome Salutations,
It has been a while because I am learning oodles of new stuff. There are a few things that I don’t want to forget so here goes.

CHARINDEX is a super easy way to get the starting location of something within a string. For example, I was looking for the last half of Superhero names. My column is SuperheroName in the Comics Table and pretend there are dashes in their names, please just for this example – I know there aren’t really dashes please continue to love me with my flaws.
So…
SELECT TOP 4 SuperheroName
FROM Comics

Results:
Bat-man
Bat-girl
Super-man
Super-girl

Now the magic, CHARINDEX will give you the location of the character you specify.

SELECT TOP 4 CHARINDEX('-', SuperheroName)
FROM Comics

Results:
4
4
6
6

How cool is that?!! But I want to pull back everything after the “-” character, which means I have to get tricky because CHARINDEX will only give me the location number of where it is within the string. SUBSTRING will save the day (Tada!). SUBSTRING is really cool. I am going to pass it ColumnName, Starting Position (using CHARINDEX), Ending Position (using LEN and the column name that will get me the length of that column on that row). So it looks like this:

SELECT TOP 4 SUBSTRING(SuperheroName,CHARINDEX('-',SuperheroName), LEN(SuperheroName))
FROM Comics

Results:
-man
-girl
-man
-girl

But that still isn’t quite what I want…so I am going to add 1 to the Starting point position number (this will allow me to skip over the character I am using):

SELECT TOP 4 SUBSTRING(SuperheroName,CHARINDEX('-',SuperheroName)+1, LEN(SuperheroName))
FROM Comics

Results:
man
girl
man
girl

Oh but wait, there is more! I think it is really silly to have the dashes in the first place so check this out:
SELECT TOP 4
SUBSTRING(SuperheroName,1,CHARINDEX('-',SuperheroName)-1) + SUBSTRING(SuperheroName,CHARINDEX('-',SuperheroName)+1, LEN(SuperheroName))
FROM Comics

Results:
Batman
Batgirl
Superman
Supergirl

Holy Rusted Metal Batman! What did we do? This time in my substring I used the first position and then the CHARINDEX -1 to tell me what was right before the dash. Then I combined them! With these super powers combined…well awesome things happen.

Enjoy!