According to T-SQL Tuesday rules as ratified by me in the first and second T-SQL Tuesday posts, the T-SQL Tuesday host is supposed to post a roundup within two days of the end of the event. So a reasonable person should expect a roundup to be posted by the second Thursday of the month. It gives me no pleasure to admit that I've been completely ...

The query optimizer is a finicky thing, and sometimes it doesn't understand exactly what you're trying to do until you give it a bit more information. The situation I'm going to describe in this post is one such case. By providing the optimizer with ever-so-slightly more data, it's possible to make some XML processing over 300 times faster. ...

Earlier today you may have seen a blog post of mine about a puzzle involving HAVING. You should read that post before this one. It was part of Adam Machanic’s T-SQL Tuesday meme. The question was about the query: SELECT 'No Rows' WHERE 1=2 HAVING 1=1; And here’s the explanation. Start by making yourself a "dual table", like ...

(Reposted from my msmvps.com blog) Adam’s hosting another T-SQL Tuesday, for which this post is jumping in. He’s themed it around T-SQL Puzzles, which I found quite interesting, because the world is full of them. Most of the questions that I answer on forums, help sites, and so on, are puzzles. I guess there’s the difference between “Problem” ...