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 ...

A few days ago Aaron posted yet another fantastic entry in his Bad Habits series, this one discussing mishandling of date ranges in queries. This is a topic near and dear to me, having had to clean up a lot of poorly thought out code in the past few years. Aaron's post includes many examples, all of which boil down to the proper way to do the job, ...

Tell me if this situation sends a chill down your spine: You've written a stored procedure, tested it against a variety of inputs, and finally rolled it out in production. All is well... Or so you think. You start getting complaints from some users that it's taking forever to return. But other users are having no problem. What ...