By Itzik Ben-Gan, 05/22/2012
Itzik continues his discussion of T-SQL best practices; he discusses cloud compatibility, date and time best practices, the importance of writing in a standard way, and ...
By Itzik Ben-Gan, 04/20/2012
Some T-SQL best practices include thinking in a relational way, always remembering NULLs and the three-valued-logic, realizing the full implications of using the NOLOCK hint and ...
By Itzik Ben-Gan, 03/19/2012
A key element in query tuning is using the execution plan to determine the reasons for poor query performance. SQL Server provides rich information about query plans in the ...
By Itzik Ben-Gan, 01/26/2012
Itzik wraps up his discussion of SQL Server 2012's window functions by focusing on optimization. He provides indexing guidelines for optimal performance, and he describes cases ...
By Itzik Ben-Gan, 12/13/2011
SQL Server 2012 enhances support for window aggregate functions. In part 2 of this series, Itzik discusses window offset functions and window distribution functions.
By Itzik Ben-Gan, 11/21/2011
SQL Server 2012 enhances support for window aggregate functions by introducing window order and frame clauses, support for offset functions, and support for window distribution ...
By Itzik Ben-Gan, 10/26/2011
Itzik explains how to handle type conversions when you need to convert a character string value to another type, in both SQL Server 2008 and SQL Server Denali.
By Itzik Ben-Gan, 09/14/2011
Learn about some common string manipulation tasks, such as counting occurrences of a substring within a string, verifying an exact number of occurrences of a substring within a ...
By Itzik Ben-Gan, 08/16/2011
Itzik presents a real-world T-SQL challenge that involves generating a sequence of license plates.
By Itzik Ben-Gan, 07/25/2011
More advanced uses of the APPLY table operator include efficient parallelism of queries, reuse of column aliases, aggregate over columns, unpivoting, and inlining scalar functions.
By Itzik Ben-Gan, 06/20/2011
The APPLY table operator accepts two table expressions as input and applies the right table expression to each row from the left, allowing correlations from the right table ...
By Itzik Ben-Gan, 05/24/2011
By Itzik Ben-Gan, 05/23/2011
SQL Server Denali’s sequences feature provides several advantages over the IDENTITY column property. Learn how to cache sequence values, obtain a range of sequence values, and ...
By Itzik Ben-Gan, 04/20/2011
Itzik discusses the foundations of set theory and explains why it’s important to think in terms of sets when addressing querying tasks rather than thinking in iterative or cursor ...
By Itzik Ben-Gan, 04/17/2011
SQL Server Denali provides support for sequences, which are more flexible than the IDENTITY column property and offer several advantages over IDENTITY.
By Itzik Ben-Gan, 03/14/2011
SQL Server's choices of whether or not to use parallelism, the degree of parallelism (DOP), and CPU costing aspects of iterators depend on the number of CPUs available in the ...
By Itzik Ben-Gan, 03/11/2011
Itzik continues his discussion of the new SQL Server filter called OFFSET/FETCH. He explains the use of the filter in table expressions, logical query processing, modifications, ...
By Itzik Ben-Gan, 02/14/2011
SQL Server 11 introduces a new filter called OFFSET/FETCH that allows filtering a requested range of rows based on given ordering, a number of rows to skip, and a number of rows ...
By Itzik Ben-Gan, 01/25/2011
Unpivoting involves rotating data from a state of columns to a state of rows. Itzik presents three techniques to unpivot data, based on the UNPIVOT operator, a cross join, and the ...
By Itzik Ben-Gan, 11/17/2010
Future versions of SQL Server would benefit from support for the row value constructor feature, which makes code less verbose, more readable, and easier to maintain.