Aaron Bertrand in SQL Server Days of the Week, Bitwise Edition I recently had to help support synchronization and distribution of workloads between multiple servers. Some of this work involves Task... 02 August 2024 7 min read
Aaron Bertrand in T-SQL Programming Index cleanup : Harder than it looks I’m not the first person to write about cleaning up unused or redundant indexes. You can read many articles about... 22 July 2024 7 min read
Edward Pollack in T-SQL Programming XML Performance Tuning and Added Options SQL Server provides a variety of ways to tune XML so that it provides consistent performance, consumes less space, all... 21 June 2024 12 min read
T-SQL Programming Edward Pollack in T-SQL Programming Effective Strategies for Storing and Parsing XML in SQL Server XML is a common storage format for data, metadata, parameters, or other semi-structured data. Because of this, it often finds... 03 June 2024 21 min read
T-SQL Programming Aaron Bertrand in T-SQL Programming Snake draft sorting in SQL Server, part 4 Part of a series: [ Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 ] In the previous... 27 May 2024 9 min read
T-SQL Programming Aaron Bertrand in T-SQL Programming Snake draft sorting in SQL Server, part 3 Part of a series: [ Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 ] In part 2... 15 May 2024 5 min read
T-SQL Programming Aaron Bertrand in T-SQL Programming Snake draft sorting in SQL Server, part 2 Part of a series: [ Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 ] In my previous... 15 April 2024 7 min read
T-SQL Programming Aaron Bertrand in T-SQL Programming Snake draft sorting in SQL Server, part 1 Part of a series: [ Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 ] I recently had... 12 April 2024 8 min read
T-SQL Programming Aaron Bertrand in T-SQL Programming Pagination and ordering by large values Pagination is a technique for limiting output. Think of Google search results, shopping the electronics category on Amazon, or browsing... 25 March 2024 9 min read
T-SQL Programming Edward Pollack in T-SQL Programming Find and Replace Text in Strings in T-SQL String manipulation is an inevitable task for developers and data professionals alike. Despite all the best efforts to normalize databases,... 29 February 2024 17 min read
Database Administration Edward Pollack in Database Administration The Importance of Retention It is always an afterthought. New objects are created that start off small and current. New feature development takes over... 19 January 2024 24 min read
T-SQL Programming Itzik Ben-Gan in T-SQL Programming Two-Dimensional Interval Packing Challenge Packing intervals is a classic SQL task that involves packing groups of intersecting intervals to their respective continuous intervals. In... 02 January 2024 17 min read
T-SQL Programming Aaron Bertrand in T-SQL Programming Counting more efficiently Nearly a decade ago, I wrote a post called “Bad habits : Counting rows the hard way.” In that post,... 20 December 2023 7 min read
T-SQL Programming Aaron Bertrand in T-SQL Programming When an update doesn’t update Tell me if you’ve heard this one before: I changed data from my application, but when I checked the database,... 27 November 2023 5 min read
T-SQL Programming Aaron Bertrand in T-SQL Programming Strategies for queries against bit columns Recently someone posted a question where they couldn’t quite figure out how to construct a predicate based on a bit... 20 November 2023 7 min read
T-SQL Programming Edward Pollack in T-SQL Programming Exporting and Importing Data into SQL Server Using Files There are plenty of applications and tools available that allow for the movement of data in and out of SQL... 23 October 2023 23 min read
T-SQL Programming Aaron Bertrand in T-SQL Programming Don’t use DISTINCT as a “join-fixer” I’ve quietly resolved performance issues by re-writing slow queries to avoid DISTINCT. Often, the DISTINCT is there only to serve... 16 October 2023 6 min read
Performance Aaron Bertrand in Performance Normalize strings to optimize space and searches While this article is specifically geared to SQL Server, the concepts apply to any relational database platform. The Stack Exchange... 02 October 2023 9 min read
T-SQL Programming Itzik Ben-Gan in T-SQL Programming T-SQL Fundamentals: Controlling Duplicates When people start learning a new field, for example T-SQL, it’s tempting to spend very little time trying to understand... 28 September 2023 20 min read
T-SQL Programming Drupal Grupal in T-SQL Programming Alternatives To SQL Server 2022 Built-in function GREATEST If you haven’t already heard, SQL Server 2022 introduced a new built-in system function called GREATEST. Simply put, it is... 18 September 2023 14 min read