Guest Columnist: Jeff Moden

"Counting" is essential to many high performance code techniques. SQL Server MVP, Jeff Moden, shows us how to make sure that we're "Counting" and not "Crippling" our trick-code.  Read more...

The Tally Table has proven to be a simple and elegant method for avoiding many varieties of RBAR. Unfortunately, one of its more common uses, that of a CSV splitter, has a well-known and serious performance problem. MVP Jeff Moden shows us what that problem is and how to correct it. (UPDATED with additional info and attachments on 5/12/2011).  Read more...

Learn how you can query a hierarchy of data and also return the results in an ordered fashion. A handy T-SQL skill that you will use over and over again.  Read more...

SQL Server MVP Jeff Moden shows us a quick and dirty bit of SQL Spackle to display the content of VARCHAR(MAX) and NVARCHAR(MAX).  Read more...

Another in the series of articles to help you "fill in the cracks" in your T-SQL knowledge. MVP Jeff Moden shows us a super simple, high performance method to solve this timeless problem.  Read more...

Fill in another bit of your T-SQL knowledge about STR(). It right justifies, rounds, and controls the output width of columns. Sounds perfect but here's why you might not want to use it.  Read more...

Fill in another bit of your T-SQL knowledge by learning how to quickly group ranges of contiguous dates without RBAR.  Read more...

Another in our series of articles to help you fill in the cracks in your knowledge with SQL Spackle. MVP Jeff Moden shows us how IsNumeric works and how you should use it.  Read more...

Fill in another bit of your T-SQL knowledge by learning how to sort a result set by the proper month order, but use the month name instead.  Read more...

A review of MVP Grant Fritchey's "Dissecting Execution Plans". This is one book that you'll want on your bookshelf.  Read more...

For today's Friday poll we have a guest editorial from Jeff Moden. The head of the anti-RBAR alliance has spent a lot of time trying to help others write better T-SQL and solve their problems with code that performs well. However this Friday Jeff asks about the CLR and how you are using it, or not using it, in the real world.  Read more...

Revisiting his very popular article on the running total and ordinal rank problems, MVP Jeff Moden brings us a detailed analysis of how you might want to implement a solution in T-SQL.  Read more...

Replacing multiple spaces with a single space is an old problem that people use loops, functions, and/or Tally tables for. Here's a set based method from MVP Jeff Moden.  Read more...

In Part 1, we learned how to make both Cross-Tabs and Pivots. In Part 2, we'll learn how to automate a very common type of Cross-Tab report and maybe learn some extra tricks on the way.  Read more...

An "old" subject is revisted where "newbies" can learn the methods and veteran users can get more performance out of the code.  Read more...

It's a well known fact that there's no such thing as a true "array" in SQL Server and that you can't pass a table as a parameter... but you can get a lot closer than you think.  Read more...

Many people have used a "Numbers" or "Tally" table without really knowing what it does. This is an introduction as to how a Tally table replaces a loop.  Read more...

SQL Server expert Jeff Moden discusses a common problem seen in many update statements.  Read more...

Learn how to solve a couple of common T-SQL issues with MVP Jeff Moden.  Read more...

Rumor has it that Concatenation functions have gotten the nasty reputation of being "performance hogs". Here's why that's not true.  Read more...