One of the things that separates a good programmer from a great one is a firm understanding about what is going on inside the computer. For some programming languages, it is very obvious what is going on inside the computer because you are working at a very low level. For example, if you are a C/C++ programmer writing an OS, you will know a lot ...

Edit: At the suggestion of a much knowledgable commenter who shall remain named Aaron, I changed from using schema_name() function to using sys.tables. When writing code that is expected to have reuse, it can be safer to use the tables rather than functions because the tables will work in the context of the database that is in the from ...

The behavior of column matching in subqueries is a little peculiar, to say the least.  If you've been bitten by this behavior once, you're unlikely to have been bitten a second time, but for some of us it just takes a while to sink in. This morning I wasted a good five minutes ''troubleshooting'' a query that wasn't working out the way I ...

I have scripts that re-create my databases for testing and development purposes. But sometimes I want to take the data from a set of tables and move it as well – I could use SSIS, or a SELECT INTO statement, but what if I want to “re-set” the data to a point in time? In other words, load it with some “base data”? I thought this might be a good ...

Back in January 2007, SQL guru Itzik Ben-Gan posted a series of MS Connect enhancement requests concerning windowing function enhancements.  Those who have used the ROW_NUMBER(), RANK(), DENSE_RANK(), and NTILE() functions on SQL 2005 and 2008, you already know how useful they are.  They simplify code and can improve performance ...

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 ...

It's well-known by now that SQL Server 2005 and 2008 include new encryption-related statements that allow you to create and administer encryption keys. You can use CREATE CERTIFICATE to create or import a certificate or DROP ASYMMETRIC KEY to remove an asymmetric key from the database, for instance.  One of the interesting ommissions ...

A setting that I noticed a while back when looking at sys.configurations was disallow results from triggers.  Triggers are one of my favorite subjects, and you will find a lot of good uses of them in my book (triggers are also well named, as poor usage of them will allow you to shoot your foot off in a heartbeat as I discussed in my earlier ...