Gail Shaw How to Confuse the SQL Server Query Optimizer Gail Shaw examines three common forms of generic SQL that can and will confuse the SQL Server Optimizer to the... 09 September 2015 35 min read
Robert Sheldon How to Get NULLs Horribly Wrong in SQL Server NULLs in SQL are a mixed blessing. The Three-Valued Logic of SQL has its uses but can cause difficulties to... 25 June 2015 36 min read
Alex Kuznetsov Reusing T-SQL Code Database programmers are often caught in the paradox of wanting to implement business rules and complex functionality in one place... 28 May 2015 27 min read
Robert Sheldon How to Get SQL Server Dates and Times Horribly Wrong One of the times that you need things to go right is when you are doing analysis and reporting. This... 28 May 2015 35 min read
Dwain Camps Using the T-SQL PERCENTILE Analytic Functions in SQL Server 2000, 2005 and 2008 Percentiles give meaning to measurements by telling you the percentage of the population being measured who get higher or lower... 18 May 2015 27 min read
Dennes Torres Optimizing Batch Process in SQL Server SQL Server batch processes are usually run from SQL Agent in background. They can take significant time and resources, especially... 08 May 2015 32 min read
Phil Factor Documenting your SQL Server Database One of the shocks that a developer can get when starting to program in T-SQL is that there is no... 06 May 2015 27 min read
Dwain Camps Time Slots – An Essential Extension to Calendar Tables After answering many forum entries from developers asking for help with dealing with SQL that involved time intervals and ranges,... 22 April 2015 24 min read
Robert Sheldon How to Get SQL Server Data-Conversion Horribly Wrong One of the most certain ways of going wrong with any relational database is to get data conversion wrong. Implicit... 02 April 2015 34 min read
Alex Kuznetsov Painless Refactoring of SQL Server Database Objects Refactoring a database object can often cause unexpected behavior in the code that accesses that object. In this article, adapted... 26 March 2015 25 min read
Roy Ernest SQL Server Spatial Indexes Spatial Data in SQL Server has special indexing because it has to perform specialised functions. It is able, for example,... 18 March 2015 20 min read
Dwain Camps Self-maintaining, Contiguous Effective Dates in Temporal Tables 'Temporal' tables contain facts that are valid for a period of time. When they are used for financial information they... 10 March 2015 38 min read
Thomas LeBlanc Defusing Database Time Bombs: Avoiding the Need to Refactor Databases Where applications are evolved by gradually molding them to a growing understanding of the business domain, this presents great challenges... 27 February 2015 23 min read
Joe Celko The DRI Subject of References A database must be able to maintain and enforce the business rules and relationships in data in order to maintain... 11 February 2015 13 min read
Dennes Torres Checking the Plan Cache Warnings for a SQL Server Database How often do you check your query plans during development to see if they contain any warnings? If you're missing... 11 February 2015 10 min read
Robert Sheldon Questions About T-SQL Control-of-Flow Language You Were Too Shy to Ask Surely, we all know how T-SQL Control-of-flow language works? In fact it is surprisingly easy to get caught out. What,... 26 January 2015 29 min read
Dwain Camps Bowled Over by SQL Window Functions What better way to learn how to construct complex CHECK CONSTRAINTs, use the SQL 2012 window frame capability of the... 26 January 2015 27 min read
Joe Celko Discrete and Continuous data in SQL Not all data is discrete; some data types represent a continuum. In SQL, we have to approximate them and live... 06 January 2015 17 min read
Robert Sheldon Questions About Pivoting Data in SQL Server You Were Too Shy to Ask Of all the basic SQL operations, the pivot seems to cause the most problems. We can tell from the way... 01 January 2015 30 min read
Dwain Camps Archiving Hierarchical, Deleted Transactions Using XML When you delete a business transaction from the database, there are times when you might want to keep a record... 30 December 2014 18 min read
