Links
Random links from the "Internet tubes" that you may enjoy -- free of charge!
I've written a two part article on using SQL GROUP BY clauses over at SQLTeam.com. read more...
There's a great series of posts over at Scott Guthrie's Blog covering LINQ, a new feature in the upcoming version of Visual Studio ("Orcas"). Check it out; I have not had a chance to play around with it yet, but it certainly looks very interesting. The articles are very well done and explain the concept very clearly with lots of examples.
There's two interesting posts over at the MSDN blogs from Craig Freedman about the new PIVOT operator in SQL 2005. First, he gives a nice overview of the operator and how to use it, and then he follows it up with a performance analysis as well. A good read, check it out.
SQL Server User-Defined Functions (UDFs) can return either a single value or virtual tables. However, sometimes we might like for a User-Defined Function to simply return more than 1 piece of information, but an entire table is more than what we need.
In my SQLBulkCopy article, I mentioned that you can quickly copy data from anything that implements IDataReader to a SQL Server table using SQLBulkCopy (new in .NET 2.0). In this SQLTeam forum post, Jesse Hersch (jezemine) tells us that SQLBulkCopy only actually uses 3 methods of the interface. This means that it is very easy to quickly create your own custom class which implements this interface to bulk copy pretty much any type of object collection or array to a SQL Server table.
Did you know that a new feature in SQL Server 2005 allows you to specify an OVER partition for aggregate functions in your SELECT statements?
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Here's my response to a SQL Challenge, regarding how to find consecutive free time slots in a schedule. This can sometimes be tricky to solve in SQL, but using either of the two techniques shown here, it is actually pretty easy. (Updated to show 2 possible solutions)
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Be sure to visit SQLTeam.com to check out my latest article, Custom Auto-Generated Sequences in SQL Server. It addresses a common question we see in the SQL Team forums.
I just discovered Joe Celko's weblog; it is really entertaining, at least the 5-6 posts I've read so far! It seems the "blog" is actually just a collection of questions and Celko's rather, umm, "honest" responses from various newsgroups and forums.
Congratulations to our good friend Alex Papadimoulis over at the asp.net weblogs on his Microsoft MVP award. Well-earned!
Here's kind of a funny/scary thread over at the DailyWTF:
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