Should SQL Server even have functions? (Oh yeah – this is a T-SQL Tuesday post, hosted this month by Brad Schulz) Functions serve an important part of programming, in almost any language. A function is a piece of code that is designed to return something, as opposed to a piece of code which isn’t designed to return anything (which is known as a ...

I’m now doing two sessions at the SQL Saturday event in Portland. I had been scheduled to do a single session (on indexes), but got an email yesterday asking if I could do another one as well. So now I’m going to do a session earlier in the day about Joins. Yes, JOINs. Nice co-incidence to find that this month’s T-SQL Tuesday, hosted by Stuart ...

T-SQL Tuesday, the invention of Adam Machanic (@AdamMachanic), is what he calls a recurring, revolving blog party. Each month, a new host picks a topic, invites bloggers of all levels to join in, and then after all the submissions are in, writes a summary of all of the entries. This encourages people to participate in the community more ...

It’s not quite a Best Practice, but it’s something that I see as very important. It makes the difference between someone who might be quite good at T-SQL, and someone who can go past the rest and become one of those people who get asked to solve other people’s T-SQL problems. It’s easy – you read the plans. You see, the plans explain to you ...

I wrote a post recently about how query tuning isn’t just about how quickly the query runs – that if you have something (such as SSIS) that is consuming your data (and probably introducing a bottleneck), then it might be more important to have a query which focuses on getting the first bit of data out. You can read that post here.  In ...

No really – hear me out. Of course you create tables, and you query tables, and we say that data is stored in tables. The table is (rightly) a fundamental part of relational theory. But I find that when I think about queries and how they run, I need to approach the system thinking about the indexes that I’m querying, not the tables. When you ...

I’m giving a presentation on May 12th at the Adelaide .Net User Group, around the topic of spatial data, and in particular, the visualization of said data. Given that it’s about one the larger types, this post should also count towards Michael Coles’ T-SQL Tuesday on BLOB data. I wrote recently about my experience with exploded data, but what I ...

It's time for the fourth T-SQL Tuesday, managed this time by Mike Walsh. I almost missed this deadline completely, since I didn't see the announcement at all. I wrote to Adam to ask if there even was an event this month, since I wasn't able to get into my own blog site (www.SQLBlog.com) for a week, and he pointed me to Mike's site. I'm wondering ...

In SQL Server, the cost of a particular plans is based largely on I/O, which makes this post a good candidate for this month’s T-SQL Tuesday, hosted by Mike Walsh who, like me, walks a straight path. In considering I/O – the movement of data generally In and Out of disk and memory – my thoughts come very much to query cost. If I run set ...

When working with time intervals, we often want to ask a couple of basic questions: Which time periods are not covered by our intervals? These are known as ''gaps''. What are the time ranges that we are fully covering? These are known as ''islands''. If you're unfamiliar with ''gaps'' and ''islands'' I highly recommend reading some ...