In my last blog post:  http://sqlblog.com/blogs/andrew_kelly/archive/2008/02/27/when-getdate-is-not-a-constant.aspx I mentioned that I ran across a situation in which GETDATE() used in a SELECT statement occasionally returned more than 1 value for the result set. That sparked quite a debate amongst SQL Server programmers who belonged to ...

       One of the most common trends that I see related to performance & scalability with SQL Server is a poorly configured or implemented storage subsystem. There is a ton of information out there on this subject but in my opinion that is part of the problem.  Too much data is not always a good thing and there ...

    I am still amazed at how many of the database applications written today still disregard some basic rules of thumb when it comes to accessing the data. One in particular is the use of COUNT(*) to check to see if there are any rows that match some criteria. The technique of using EXISTS over COUNT(*) has been widely publicized ...

Did you know you can ALTER an existing column to give it the identity property? If you look up ALTER TABLE in the BOL index, you'll see this: ALTER TABLE table_name   { [ ALTER COLUMN column_name        {DROP DEFAULT |          SET DEFAULT ...

I'm sure that some of you have been annoyed when searching or using the index and found a hit, thinking it looks strange, only to realize that you are looking at a ''Compact Edition'' topic. This has happened to me more than once. We just had a discussion about this in the MVP group and Umachandar Jayachandran (aka UC) have use this great ...

On a private newsgroup I read, the question was asked: ''Samples in or out of the box? For the next release of SQL Server we're thinking of just shipping sample code on the web, instead of shipping on the web and also in the SQL Server box on a CD as we have done in the past.'' And I replied (amongst other things) that it would be nice if ...