Relative comparison is a simple matter of human nature. From early childhood we compare and contrast what we see in the world around us, building a means by which to rate what we experience. And as it turns out, this desire to discover top and bottom, rightmost and leftmost, or best and worst happens to extend quite naturally into business ...

A couple of days ago, Aaron Bertrand posted about a method for calculating medians in SQL Server 2005 using the ROW_NUMBER function in conjunction with the COUNT aggregate. This method (credited to Itzik Ben-Gan) is interesting, but I discovered an even better way to attack the problem in Joe Celko's Analytics and OLAP in SQL.Rather than using a ...

Scalar.  Function.Wow.Could any other combination of words evoke the same feeling of encapsulation, information hiding, and simplification of client code?  After years spent developing software in the procedural and OO worlds, it can be difficult--perhaps, even impossible--to migrate over to working with SQL Server and not consider how ...

I keep seeing questions on newsgroups about paging in stored procedures, and whether there will be a better way in SQL Server 2005. However, aside from a few answers in newsgroups, I haven't seen any content on how to do it. So I'd like to spend a few minutes and share with you the new features that will make paging stored procedures ...