Tables are only metadata. They don’t store data. I’ve written something about this before, but I want to take a viewpoint of this idea around the topic of joins, especially since it’s the topic for T-SQL Tuesday this month. Hosted this time by Sebastian Meine (@sqlity), who has a whole series on joins this month. Good for him – it’s a great ...

This month’s T-SQL Tuesday has me caught slightly unawares. I’m in the UK, having come over for SQLBits, and I’m left writing this with only a few hours to go. The theme this time is on misconceptions in SQL, and this fits nicely with SARGability – one of the topics that I presented on at SQLBits a week and a half ago. I often see people refer ...

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 ...