Laerte Junior Fun with SQL Server Profiler trace files and PowerShell Running Profiler traces against multiple servers becomes a painful process when it's time to collate and filter all that data.... 25 November 2010 13 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
Holger Schmeling SQL Server Statistics A Distribution Statistics object is a sampled map of the distribution of data in a table. Such statistics help the... 23 November 2010 3 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
Benjamin Nevarez Inside the SQL Server Query Optimizer This book will take you from the fundamentals of Statistics, Cost Estimation, Index Selection, and the Execution Engine, and guide... 08 November 2010 2 min read
Leidago Noabeb Using Table Valued Parameters with VB.NET SQL Server's Table-Valued Parameters are useful, and easy to use, but you should be aware that something that looks loke... 03 November 2010 13 min read
Red Gate Books The Red Gate Guide to SQL Server Team-based Development This book shows how to use a mixture of home-grown scripts, native SQL Server tools, and tools from the Red... 02 November 2010 5 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
Richard Morris Kevan Riley: DBA of the Day When the ASK.SQLServerCentral.com site started, something magical happened. A band of DBA and developer volunteers got together to ensure the... 18 October 2010 13 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
Nick Harrison Under the ORM Hood: Revealing the SQL Your application code may look neat and clean, and you are using a sound Object-relational Mapper, but when you put... 05 October 2010 13 min read
