Lookup tables are widely used in database applications for good reasons. Usually, a lookup table has a small number of rows and looking it up with a join is fast, especially when the table is already cached. Recently, I needed to update every row in many relatively large tables, each of which was identically structured, had ~25 million ...

I got a question yesterday in the mail that I thought I would just answer here in a broad context. While I can’t troubleshoot or do performance tuning from a distance, there are some interesting concepts and suggestions this e-mail brings up: “I have recently seen a change from SQL Server from 2005 to 2008 in where it handles CASE statements ...