This month's T-SQL Tuesday is being hosted by Dave Howard (@DaveH0ward), and the topic is ''Second Chances.'' What he's letting us do is look back at all the previous T-SQL Tuesdays and pick a topic that we missed or maybe thought we needed another crack at. I chose a recent topic that I missed due to travel, ''Data Presentation,'' hosted by ...

In my last post, I showed a technique for dealing with working columns when writing T-SQL. The idea was around using APPLY to be able to push values from the existing set through calculations (but preferably not scalar functions, of course), producing new columns which can be used further down the query, even in the WHERE and GROUP BY clauses. ...

T-SQL Tuesday #25 fell on the same day I brought my mother home from a 3-day emergency trip to the hospital. She's much better, now, but it was a bit crazy there for a little bit. Thanks for everyone's best wishes. Rob Farley kicked off the official start of the event with a post titled A T-SQL Tip: Working calculations. He showed us how to use ...

T-SQL Tuesday again and this month is on T-SQL Tips (thanks Allen!). In some ways it’s a tough topic, because there are things I don’t really consider tips that other people do, and vice-versa. This one’s legitimate though: Using CROSS APPLY for working columns in calculations. Let me give you an example. Back in 2009, I wrote a blog post on ...

It doesn't seem that long ago that having cool little tidbits of information about SQL Server made a huge difference in how effective you could be. Well, that's still true, but let me give you an example. SELECT name FROM sysobjects WHERE sysstat & 4 > 0 In the early days of SQL Server, this was the way to pull a list of the names of all ...

This month's T-SQL Tuesday is being hosted by Brad Schulz (blog) and the topic is one that should attract a lot of submissions: Procedures and Functions. Last week, I talked about the case against INFORMATION_SCHEMA views - I provided several examples where I feel the INFORMATION_SCHEMA views fall short of the catalog views, and expressed my ...

I love the T-SQL Tuesday tradition, started by Adam Machanic and hosted this month by Brad Shulz. I am a little pressed for time this month, so today’s post is a short ode to how I love saving time with Composable Code in SQL. Composability is one of the very best features of SQL, but sometimes gets picked on due to both real and imaginary ...

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 ...

This month's T-SQL Tuesday is a week early due to the upcoming PASS Summit. It is being hosted by Stuart Ainsworth (blog | @codegumbo) and the topic is a general one: JOINs. I had an idea for a very brief post showing the typical join operations we use to solve common queries, and a more interesting but less common way we can solve the ...

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 ...