Ben Johnston in Blogs Writing an Efficient Query SQL is easy to start writing. The basic syntax to start returning data is very simple. This low threshold for starting SQL hides some of... 19 October 2024 20 min read
Phil Factor Temporary Tables in SQL Server Temporary tables are used by every DB developer, but they're not likely to be too adventurous with their use, or exploit all their advantages. They... 01 August 2020 22 min read
Roy Ernest Introduction to SQL Server Spatial Data Many applications require the handling of geospatial data. Roy and Surenda take you through the basics of SQL Server spatial data types. … 18 March 2020 22 min read
Blogs Dennes Torres in Blogs Graph Edge Constraints and a Crystal Ball When I read the list of new features in SQL Server 2019 I became very proud of my crystal ball powers. In July 2017 I... 08 December 2018 2 min read
Blogs Phil Factor in Blogs Spoofing Data Convincingly: Doing the Shuffle and Zip Having spent a lot of my working life trying to preserve the integrity of data, there was a certain intriguing novelty in the idea of... 13 August 2018 6 min read
Blogs Phil Factor in Blogs Spoofing Data Convincingly: Credit Cards I haven’t seen a SQL Server table with real unencrypted credit card numbers for several years, and I don’t know of any good reasons to... 08 August 2018 8 min read
Blogs Louis Davidson in Blogs Operator Precedence versus the Confusing Constraint Translation The other day, a person I work with was creating some fairly complex CHECK constraints to protect data in a new table that was being... 30 April 2018 6 min read
Blogs Louis Davidson in Blogs Just What Exactly Will Cast to a Bit Value? I am working through my OneNote folder of blog ideas, and this one, while being one of the least consequential of them, was the most... 02 April 2018 4 min read
Blogs Phil Factor in Blogs Using Stored Procedures in SQL Server that return several results. Stored Procedures give you more freedom than functions, and so they would be the obvious way of developing processes in SQL Server. There is one... 07 March 2018 3 min read
Robert Sheldon SQL Server System Functions: The Basics Every SQL Server Database programmer needs to be familiar with the System Functions. These range from the sublime (such as @@rowcount or @@identity) to the... 31 March 2016 22 min read
Robert Sheldon SQL Server Metadata Functions: The Basics To be able to make full use of the system catalog to find out more about a database, you need to be familiar with the... 09 March 2016 21 min read
Uwe Ricken When AUTO_UPDATE_STATISTICS Doesn’t Happen When your SQL Server database is set to have its statistics automatically updated, you will probably conclude that, whenever the distribution statistics are out-of-date, they... 07 March 2016 10 min read
Joe Celko SQL GROUP BY Basics It sometimes pays to go back and look at what you think you already know about SQL. Joe Celko gives a quick revision of the... 08 February 2016 15 min read
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 than using procedural code in... 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 the database should do it.... 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 snippets suit developers fine but... 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 other hand, CUBE and ROLLUP... 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 Fritchey asked the question on... 15 October 2015 14 min read
Phil Factor Dependencies and References in SQL Server It is important for developers and DBAs to be able to determine the interdependencies of any database object. Perhaps you need to work out what... 24 September 2015 20 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 has such different characteristics, and... 09 September 2015 16 min read
