A few weeks ago, I wrote a post about forming a new habit: always terminate statements with semi-colons.  Today I thought I would start a series on kicking bad habits that many of us have developed over time.  I provided a little more background on this series over on my company's site.  Today's topic: using ordinal numbers in our ...

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 ...

When developing stored procedures, there seems to be a lot of emphasis on ''get it done fast.'' Which means type all lower case, pay little attention to formatting, and sometimes throw best practices out the window. Personally, I would rather front-load my development time; I think that the costs I pay in initial development far outweigh what ...

I guess that many people using UPDATE … FROM on a daily basis do so without being aware that they are violating all SQL standards.   All versions of the ANSI SQL standard that I checked agree that an UPDATE statement has three clauses – the UPDATE clause, naming the table to be updated; the SET clause, specifying the columns to change and ...

Did you know that SQL Server allows stored procedures to have up to 2100 parameters? And more important: do you care? Well, some people do care, and Joe Celko seems to be one of them.   If you are a regular reader of SQL Server newsgroups, you probably know Joe Celko from his always unfriendly and often incorrect replies. Here is a typical ...