A few days ago Adam Machanic proposed a great idea about a T-SQL Tuesday. Every Tuesday there would be a topic bloggers all around would post about. Chosen as the first topic was the date and time stuff in SQL Server.
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A while back I was thinking about SQL Server’s capabilities of returning data as XML with FOR XML and it occurred to me that maybe returning 10.000 results as xml would be faster that the way SQL server returns them now in Tabular Data Stream (TDS).
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Due to a bug i haven’t anticipated, a whole load of users with non English SSMS couldn’t install the latest SSMS Tools Pack 1.7.
The SSMS Tools Pack 1.7.5.1 fixes this as well as 1 other major bug that was reported and 3 smaller ones.
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Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, the STP is back to rock your world! The new feature is SQL Snippets to speed up your development. This new version brings one completely new option, full GUI redesign, completely rewritten installer, improved error handling and reporting, bug fixes and old features improvements.
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We all know how to find only duplicated rows in a table. Since SQL Server 2005 this became really simple using a ROW_NUMBER() window function like this:
USE AdventureWorks GO ;WITH cteDupes AS ( -- find all rows that have the same AddressLine1 and City.
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Simply put:
I prefer using surrogate keys because natural keys are by default a subject to change which is a bad behavior for a row identifier.
But let’s dig a bit deeper into each key type to see why this is.
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Today I had an interesting problem. If I rebuilt my solution every thing would succeed but after that if i pressed F5 (build) the whole solution would get built again but it would error out.
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On September 2nd this years biggest online SQL Server related event will begin.
It’s the 24 hours of PASS. The 24 one-hour presentations will begin at 00:00 GMT (UTC) on September 2, 2009 and it will last full 24 hours.
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The Running Totals problem is as old as accounting. In SQL Server there are different ways of calculating it and the general consensus is that it is one of the few problems best handled with a cursor.
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Today on twitter Lori Edwards (@loriedwards) asked how can you check when was SQL Server installed with a T-SQL query. Otherwise this is pretty simple by looking at the creation time of master database (provided you never had to restore it).
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I’ll be talking about the following topics:
What should developers know about database design so they don't have performance and logical problems? What's new in SQL Server 2008 that helps solve some business problems that sometime required "hacking" before.
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There are times when you want to have one .cs file in multiple projects. However if you do Add existing item you’ll notice that the file is copied to each project’s folder.
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I’ve written two articles on SQLTeam.com about a great new feature in SQL Server 2008 called Extended Events. They are the new low level, high performance eventing system in SQL Server.
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Recently i was looking for a SQL Server 2008 based template that would look cool. Since I haven’t found anything I’ve made my own. It’s a dark background template that you can use freely.
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A while back we had an interesting problem at work. We were calculating MD5 hashes for some values in both .Net and SQL Server and although the input values were all the same our MD5 hashes were different.
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Indexes are one of the most important database features. Without them your database will crawl under a table in fear of simple queries on large tables or complex queries on small tables.
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I was tagged by Denis Gobo in the latest blog meme: What was your first computer and games you’ve played?
Well mine was the Sinclair ZX Spectrum. I got it when i was 9 years old and I only used it to play games.
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This new version brings one completely new feature and a few improved old ones. The new feature is Window Connection Coloring. It includes a colored strip indicator that can be docked to any side of the window.
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On Saturday 31st January 2009 at around 14:40 UTC something “historical” happened. Google virtually stopped working. It might as well died. Every single search result was marked with “This site may harm your computer.
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Comparing result sets There are times, although not often that you have to compare 2 result sets. This usually happens when you're analyzing data for whatever reason or unit testing a database.
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