There are interesting things to be learned from even the simplest queries.  For example, imagine you are given the task of writing a query to list AdventureWorks product names where the product has at least one entry in the transaction history table, but fewer than ten. One possible query to meet that specification is: SELECT ...

You might have noticed that January was a quiet blogging month for me.  Part of the reason was that I was working on a series of articles for Simple Talk, examining how parallel query execution really works.  The first part is published today ...

When you write a query to return the first few rows from a potential result set, you’ll often use the TOP clause.  To give a precise meaning to the TOP operation, it will normally be accompanied by an ORDER BY clause.  Together, the TOP…ORDER BY construction can be used to precisely identify which top ‘n’ rows should be returned. The ...