I recently overheard a remark by Greg Low in which he said something akin to ''the most interesting parts of a new SQL Server release are the myriad of small things that are in there that make a developer's life easier'' (I'm paraphrasing because I can't remember the actual quote but it was something like that). The new DATEFROMPARTS ...

The optimizer is the part of SQL Server that takes your query and reorders and rearranges your query to find the optimal execution plan. In theory.   In practice, that doesn’t always work out well. Often, the optimizer manages to come up with brilliant ways to execute a complex query very efficiently – but sometimes, it misses an ...

Almost two months have passed since my last blog post. And while it’s true that I’ve had (much) longer breaks, I do have a good reason now. All the time that I would normally at least in part spend on preparing new blog posts is now reserved for preparing presentations for a few upcoming events. I’ll give you an overview – who knows, maybe you’ll ...

Reigniting the [SCDEndDate] debate In November 2009 I wrote a blog post entitled Debunking Kimball Effective Dates where I stated that I was against the Kimball-recommended practice of maintaining a StartDate & EndDate value for every record in a type 2 slowly changing dimension (SCD) table (i.e. the values highlighted in blue in the ...