Dwain Camps How to Avoid Conditional JOINs in T-SQL Relational databases go out of their way to execute SQL, however bad the crimes against Codd and relational theory within... 07 September 2015 14 min read
Kathi Kellenberger T-SQL Window Functions Speed Phreakery Before SQL Server had SQL window functions, SQL Server developers had to use all manner of tricks and algorithms to... 27 August 2015 12 min read
Robert Sheldon Working with SQL Server data in Power BI Desktop What's the best way of providing self-service business intelligence (BI) to data that is held in on-premise SQL Server? Not,... 24 August 2015 24 min read
Tony Davis Basic SQL Server Performance Troubleshooting For Developers The speed of a slow SQL Query can almost always be improved. In SQL Server, the query optimizer determines the... 14 August 2015 39 min read
Robert Sheldon The Evolution of SQL Server BI It is sometimes hard to keep up with Microsoft's direction in Business Intelligence. Over the years, we've been presented with... 27 July 2015 14 min read
Edward Elliott Non-Breaking Online Database Deployments For an experienced database developer, the idea of doing non-breaking database deployments while the database is still online holds respect... 21 July 2015 11 min read
Joe Celko SQL Style Habits: Attack of the Skeuomorphs Although we like to think that our programming techniques are progressive and in tune with the bleeding edge of software... 14 July 2015 13 min read
Nicolas Prigent PowerShell Day-to-Day Admin Tasks: Monitoring Performance By reading performance counters from services such as SQL Server or Exchange, you can get a wealth of performance information.... 01 July 2015 13 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
Adam Aspin SQLXML Bulk Loader Basics SQLXML isn't exactly new technology, but like the even more venerable BCP, it remains the quickest and most reliable way... 02 June 2015 26 min read
Feodor Georgiev Using R to Explore Data by Analysis – for SQL Professionals What's the best way for a SQL programmer to learn about R? It's probably by trying out various experiments with... 02 June 2015 17 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
Tim Hidalgo Managing Test Data as a Database CI Component – Part 2 Once you're clear about what data the developers and testers need to be able to be effective, you have several... 28 May 2015 10 min read
Robert Sheldon How to Get SQL Server Dates and Times Horribly Wrong One of the times that you need things to go right is when you are doing analysis and reporting. This... 28 May 2015 35 min read
Nicolas Prigent PowerShell Day-to-Day Admin Tasks: WMI, CIM and PSWA WMI (Windows Management Instrumentation) is the basic way of querying and changing basic information about any windows server, including SQL... 28 May 2015 12 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 Optimizing Batch Process in SQL Server SQL Server batch processes are usually run from SQL Agent in background. They can take significant time and resources, especially... 08 May 2015 32 min read
Phil Factor Documenting your SQL Server Database One of the shocks that a developer can get when starting to program in T-SQL is that there is no... 06 May 2015 27 min read
Robert Sheldon How to Get SQL Server Security Horribly Wrong It is no good doing some or most of the aspects of SQL Server security right. You have to get... 29 April 2015 24 min read
Feodor Georgiev Making Data Analytics Simpler: SQL Server and R R and SQL Server are a match made in heaven. You don't need anything special to get started beyond the... 28 April 2015 13 min read
