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
Robert Sheldon Questions About T-SQL Transaction Isolation Levels You Were Too Shy to Ask Every time you access a relational database to make a query, you have an important decision to make: What is... 04 December 2014 28 min read
Phil Factor Bitwise Operations in T-SQL How can you, in T-SQL, get a list of columns that have changed within a trigger? How can you see... 18 November 2014 22 min read
Dwain Camps Using Stored Procedures to Provide an Application’s Business-Logic Layer When faced with a complex business application that had to be delivered with minimum staffing, on-time and within budget, Dwain's... 14 November 2014 44 min read
Robert Sheldon Questions About Using TSQL to Import Excel Data You Were Too Shy to Ask It is easy to import Excel data into database tables via TSQL, using OLEDB, either by the OPENROWSET function or... 05 November 2014 31 min read
William Sisson Set-based Constraint Violation Reporting in SQL Server When you're importing data into an RDBMS in bulk and an exception condition is raised because of a constraint violation,... 07 October 2014 18 min read
Robert Sheldon Questions about Primary and Foreign Keys You Were Too Shy to Ask It is strange that one can ask simple questions about extended events or Hekaton at professional events and conferences without... 06 October 2014 36 min read
Dwain Camps Filling In Missing Values Using the T-SQL Window Frame Since SQL Server delivered the entire range of window functions, there has been far less justification for using the non-standard... 18 September 2014 18 min read
Robert Sheldon Questions about T-SQL Expressions You Were Too Shy to Ask Nobody seems to ask questions about SQL Expressions in forums, even though expressions can cause all sorts of problems. Even... 13 August 2014 43 min read
Phil Factor Quickly Investigating What’s in the Tables of SQL Server Databases From SQL Server Management Studio it is difficult to look through the first few rows of a whole lot of... 12 August 2014 27 min read
Joe Celko The SQL of Membership: Equivalence Classes & Cliques It is awkward to do 'Graph databases' in SQL to explore the sort of relationships and memberships in social networks... 28 July 2014 11 min read
Robert Sheldon Questions about SQL Server Data Types You were Too Shy to Ask Although SQL Data Types seem to cause a lot of grief for database developers and can be tricky in their... 14 July 2014 41 min read
Dwain Camps Calculating and Verifying Check Digits in T-SQL A lot of numbers that we use everyday such as Bank Card numbers, Identification numbers, and ISBN codes, have check... 11 July 2014 24 min read
Robert Sheldon SQL Server Tables – 11 Questions You Were Too Shy to Ask There are some aspects of tables in SQL Server that a lot of people get wrong, purely because they seem... 18 June 2014 35 min read
David Poole Experiments with NEO4J: Using a graph database as a SQL Server metadata hub NEO4J, the graph database, can be used to provide answers that are very tricky for relational databases, including providing diagrams... 17 June 2014 18 min read
Kalen Delaney Row Versioning Concurrency in SQL Server The optimistic concurrency model assumes that several concurrent transactions can usually complete without interfering with each other, and therefore do... 05 June 2014 44 min read
