Michael Francis SQL Source Control – Less Pain for Red Jungle As a dedicated 'twitcher', Michael's eye is caught by a 'tweet' from Red Jungle. In this case, it was not... 26 November 2010 5 min read
Benjamin Nevarez Index Selection and the Query Optimizer While we all know that the Query Optimizer uses Indexes to produce better execution plans, we don't all know exactly... 25 November 2010 23 min read
Robert Sheldon The DELETE statement in SQL Server Of the big four DML statements in SQL Server, the DELETE is the one least written about. This is odd... 25 November 2010 11 min read
Patrick Index Executing SSIS Packages continued When Nigel Rivett wrote his article about Executing SSIS packages for Simple-Talk, four years ago, it proved very popular and... 25 November 2010 5 min read
Alex Kuznetsov Modifying Contiguous Time Periods in a History Table Alex Kuznetsov is credited with a clever technique for creating a history table for SQL that is designed to store... 25 November 2010 7 min read
Fabiano Amorim ShowPlan Operator of the Week – Merge Join Did you ever wonder how and why your indexes affect the performance of joins? Once you've read Fabiano's unforgettable explanation,... 22 November 2010 9 min read
Joe Celko Contiguous Time Periods It is always better, and more efficient, to maintain referential integrity by using constraints rather than triggers. Sometimes it is... 22 November 2010 13 min read
Phil Factor Consuming JSON Strings in SQL Server It has always seemed strange to Phil that SQL Server has such complete support for XML, yet is completely devoid... 15 November 2010 26 min read
Robert Sheldon Working with Window Functions in SQL Server With SQL Server 2005, SQL Server introduced some of SQL's window functions, that apply, not to the full set, but... 28 October 2010 12 min read
Joe Celko VALUES() and Long Parameter Lists – Part II The use of the comma-separated list of parameters to a SQL routine, that Phil Factor calls the 'comedy-limited list, is... 28 October 2010 10 min read
Alex Kuznetsov Defensive Error Handling TRY...CATCH error handling in SQL Server has certain limitations and inconsistencies that will trap the unwary developer, used to the... 28 October 2010 35 min read
Holger Schmeling SQL Server Statistics: Problems and Solutions SQL Server Statistics assist the query optimiser to calculate the best way of running the query. Holger describes every common... 27 October 2010 39 min read
Holger Schmeling Queries, Damned Queries and Statistics In a perfect world, we should just be able to write queries and leave the RDBMS to decide the perfect... 14 October 2010 43 min read
Corrin Lakeland Snapper’s Sweet Source Control Corrin Lakeland's busy role as a Data Manager includes supervising the work of all database development. Although he was already... 12 October 2010 6 min read
Fabiano Amorim Showplan Operator of the Week – SORT Fabiano introduces another ShowPlan operator that is used to build a query plan, or perform an operation specified in the... 11 October 2010 5 min read
Joe Celko State Transition Constraints Data Validation in a database is a lot more complex than seeing if a string parameter really is an integer.... 08 October 2010 13 min read
Timothy Ford Investigating Transactions Using Dynamic Management Objects There can be a great difference in the performance of a particular routine in a test database, and in a... 30 September 2010 39 min read
Rod Colledge Policy-based Management and Central Management Servers Whilst it may be more exciting as a DBA to rush around fixing broken databases, it is far better to... 30 September 2010 23 min read
Robert Sheldon Working with the INSERT statement in SQL Server The INSERT statement in SQL Server is versatile. It now allows the insertion of multiple rows of literal values. It... 27 September 2010 12 min read
Greg Larsen Parameter Sniffing If a SQL query has parameters, SQL Server creates an execution plan tailored to them to improve performance, via a... 20 September 2010 13 min read
