Fabiano Amorim ShowPlan Operator of the Week – Split, Sort, Collapse 'Split, Sort & Collapse' is, happily, not a description of the intrepid Fabiano after his epic series of articles about... 11 April 2011 19 min read
Joe Celko Check your Digits The most persistent struggle in data processing has been to ensure clean data. There are many ways that data can... 07 April 2011 11 min read
Phil Factor How to Import Data from HTML pages It turns out that there are plenty of ways to get data into SQL Server from websites, whether the data... 30 March 2011 21 min read
Timothy Wiseman SQL Injection: Defense in Depth So much has been written about SQL Injection, yet such attacks continue to succeed, even against security consultants' websites. The... 17 March 2011 11 min read
Paul White Understanding and Using Parallelism in SQL Server SQL Server is able to make implicit use of parallelism to speed SQL queries. Quite how it does it, and... 03 March 2011 22 min read
Grant Fritchey Change Management and Source Control So, given the many good reasons for using Version Control systems for managing the changes in database applications, how does... 03 March 2011 47 min read
Robert Sheldon Bulk Inserts via TSQL in SQL Server The trouble with using BCP for reading data into SQL Server is that BCP is a command-line program. Fortunately, the... 31 January 2011 20 min read
Fabiano Amorim Showplan Operator of the Week – Merge Interval When Fabiano agreed to undertake the epic task of describing each showplan operator, none of us quite predicted the interesting... 11 January 2011 7 min read
Michelle Ufford Effective Clustered Indexes As a guideline, clustered Indexes should be Narrow, Unique, Static and Ever Increasing (NUSE). Michelle Ufford Explains why. … 06 January 2011 21 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
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
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
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
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
Jonathan Lewis Oracle to SQL Server: Putting the Data in the Right Place Jonathan Lewis is an Oracle expert who is recording his exploration of SQL Server in a series of articles. In... 17 September 2010 24 min read
Fabiano Amorim Showplan Operator of the Week – Stream Aggregate Fabiano continues his mission to explain the Query Optimiser in practical terms, describing, one week at a time, all the... 10 September 2010 9 min read
Robert Sheldon The MERGE Statement in SQL Server 2008 When the SQL MERGE statement was introduced in SQL Server 2008, it allowed database programmers to replace reams of messy... 27 August 2010 14 min read
Robert Sheldon Implementing the OUTPUT Clause in SQL Server 2008 In retrospect, it was probably the inclusion of the OUTPUT clause in the MERGE statement that gave SQL Server 2008... 22 July 2010 17 min read
Joe Celko VALUES() and Long Parameter Lists To make progress as a relational Database programmer, you have to think in terms of sets, rather than lists, arrays... 22 July 2010 11 min read
