Joe Celko Declarative SQL: Using References There are several ingenious ways of using SQL References to enforce integrity declaratively. Declarative Referential Integrity (DRI) is more effective... 15 December 2015 13 min read
Joe Celko Declarative SQL: Using UNIQUE Constraints In SQL, you can express the logic of what you want to accomplish without spelling out the details of how... 04 December 2015 14 min read
Grant Fritchey Using SQL Prompt to Accelerate the Top 10 Most Common Database Scripts There may be some people who enjoy repetitive typing, but Grant Fritchey doesn't. He's always preferred SQL Prompt. The standard... 04 November 2015 8 min read
William Brewer Questions About CUBE, ROLLUP and GROUPING SETs That You Were Too Shy to Ask There are few parts of SQL Syntax as familiar as the GROUP BY clause of the SELECT statement. On the... 03 November 2015 17 min read
Grant Fritchey Top 10 Most Common Database Scripts What are the scripts that a working DBA uses so often that they become part of the 'muscle memory'? Grant... 15 October 2015 14 min read
Phil Factor SQL Server Dependencies: Find & Track Object References Find and track object dependencies in SQL Server using SSMS, DMVs, and PowerShell. Covers soft vs hard dependencies, sys.sql_expression_dependencies, and... 24 September 2015 21 min read
Uwe Ricken How Forwarded Records are Read and Processed in a SQL Server Heap Before you deliberately use a heap in SQL Server rather than a table, it is worth understanding why a heap... 09 September 2015 16 min read
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 SQL Server Dates and Times: Ten Common Failures from DATETIME to DATEDIFF Ten common failures developers make with SQL Server date and time handling: DATETIME vs DATETIME2 precision, string-format assumptions, regional date... 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 SQL Server Batch Process Optimization: Auto-Growth, Locks, Log Flushes, and Index Fragmentation Step-by-step performance tuning of a SQL Server batch process - identifying and fixing auto-growth events, lock contention, WRITELOG waits, index... 08 May 2015 32 min read
Phil Factor Documenting a SQL Server Database: Extended Properties, YAML Headers, and Publishing Strategies Comprehensive guide to documenting a SQL Server database: where to keep documentation, what standards exist (XML, JSON, YAML), how to... 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
