Grant Fritchey The DBA Detective: The Case of the Missing Index When problems arise in SQL Server, we're faced with a server full of suspects, including disk I/O, memory, CPU, incorrect or missing indexes, badly written... 15 May 2013 12 min read
Kathi Kellenberger Solving Complex T-SQL Problems, Step-By-Step What should you do if your first, most intuitive solution to a problem ends up scanning the data more than is necessary, resulting in poor... 18 March 2013 19 min read
Alexander Karmanov Automating SQL Server Database Deployments: A Worked Example Alex talks through a simple practical example of a database deployment, First creating a empty database and then upgrading it through three steps by writing... 27 February 2013 21 min read
Grant Fritchey SQL Server Execution Plans, Second Edition, by Grant Fritchey Every Database Administrator, developer, report writer, and anyone else who writes T-SQL to access SQL Server data, must understand how to read and interpret execution... 16 October 2012 2 min read
Shawn McGehee SQL Backup and Restore A DBA's tasks, from day-to-day, are rarely constant; with one exception: the need to ensure each and every day that any database in their charge... 26 March 2012 3 min read
Alex Kuznetsov Close Those Loopholes: Lessons learned from Unit Testing T-SQL Alex has done some pioneering work on the testing of stored procedures over four years, and has learned a great deal in the process. In... 09 January 2012 23 min read
Phil Factor SQL Programmer’s workshop Phil Factor records, as closely as possible, the twists and turns of creating a SQL Server T-SQL stored procedure, describing the methods that work for... 05 August 2011 26 min read
T-SQL Programming Solomon Rutzky in T-SQL Programming CLR Performance Testing Are Common Language Runtime routines in SQL Server faster or slower than the equivalent TSQL code? How would you go about testing the relative performance... 21 July 2011 19 min read
Phil Factor How to develop TSQL Code The basic texts for developing SQL code tend to leave unsaid the basic techniques for building routines such as stored procedures in T-SQL. Phil is... 24 June 2011 15 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 of any support for JSON.... 15 November 2010 26 min read
Auke Teeninga Minesweeper in T-SQL Whatever happened to the idea that programming in TSQL can be fun? A Simple-Talk reader contributes an article to remind us all that there is... 02 September 2010 8 min read
Robert Sheldon SQL Server APPLY Basics One of the most interesting additions to SQL Server syntax in SQL Server 2005 was the APPLY operator. It allows several queries that were previously... 24 May 2010 12 min read
Rodney Landrum Consolidating SQL Server Error Logs from Multiple Instances Using SSIS SQL Server hides a lot of very useful information in its error log files. Unfortunately, the process of hunting through all these logs, file-by-file, server-by-server,... 14 April 2010 15 min read
Alex Kuznetsov Defensive Database Programming Inside this book, you will find dozens of practical, defensive programming techniques that will improve the quality of your T-SQL code and increase its resilience... 22 February 2010 3 min read
Brad McGehee Database Maintenance Plans in SSMS: An Overview Maintenance plans are essential. Microsoft provide two tools, the Maintenance Plan Wizard and the Maintenance Plan designer, to assist the busy DBA to get started... 06 January 2010 23 min read
Robert Sheldon Transact-SQL Formatting Standards (Coding Styles) How should SQL code be formatted? What sort of indentation should you use? Should keywords be in upper case? How should lists be lined up?... 25 August 2009 25 min read
Joe Celko Unique Experiences! You'd have thought that a unique constraint was an easy concept - Not a bit of it; it can cause a lot of subtle problems... 18 November 2008 14 min read
Anith Sen Concatenating Row Values in Transact-SQL It is an interesting problem in Transact SQL, for which there are a number of solutions and considerable debate. How do you go about producing... 31 July 2008 17 min read
Alex Kuznetsov Close these Loopholes – Reproduce Database Errors This is the final part of Alex's ground-breaking series on unit-testing Transact-SQL code. Here, he shows how you can test the way that your application... 23 May 2008 8 min read
Phil Factor Robyn Page SQL Server Grouping Workbench A gentle lesson about GROUP BY on the Nursery Slopes develops gradually into a wild ride off-piste amongst the pine-trees.… 26 April 2007 17 min read
