I have heard the name T-SQL Tuesday for (like,) ever; but I have always been so into my own bundle of insanity that never took the time to figure out what it is. This changes today because I read a blog on Adam Machanic's (@adammachanic) blog that outlined the rules (here) and I have been keen to get back to blogging regularly. When I saw what ...

I've been fairly distracted this past week with my ''Bad habits to kick'' series, so apologies for being so late with the Connect digest.  I stumbled upon a few pretty interesting items from the past two weeks; I hope you find them interesting as well. #498082 : Allow direct usage of scalar functions in RAISERROR() It has bugged me that in ...

Again I am a day early, as tomorrow I will be speaking at the CTDOTNET CodeCamp in Hartford.  As a reminder, I am not begging for votes here, just raising visibility for new issues you may not have seen yet, or older issues that have entered my peripheral vision again for some reason. ================================== Better behaving ...

Here are some issues I came across recently; most involve SSMS in some way, though Erland's assertion suggestion is a great one. And just to be clear, since I am seeing some accusations of distorting the fairness of Connect by ''asking for votes,'' I am not asking anyone to vote blindly on these items (and it's clear from last week's results that ...

Here are the items from this week that I feel deserve some attention.  I'm also adding a little bit of analysis to this.  I am always curious if my vote-pimping has any effect, so I am going to start taking a note of the ratings at the time I publish the post, and then compare them when I publish the next post.  This will give me ...

For years, SQL Server has supported a (second) FROM clause in UPDATE and DELETE statements. Its behavior isn't always deterministic, a fact Microsoft points out in the documentation. Today, someone was surprised by the basic semantics of DELETE .. FROM. This probably happens a lot, but fortunately today's surprisee posted this ...