Joe Celko returns with another stumper to celebrate Easter. Unsurprisingly, this involves eggs. More surprising is the nature of the puzzle: This time, the puzzle is one of designing a database rather than a query. DDL as well as the DML.   Read more...

In which Phil decides to use a table consisting of all the common words in English to explore ways of cheating at Scrabble and writing doggerel using SQL Server. He then issues a SQL challenge.  Read more...

A guest editorial from Phil Factor looks at the Speed Phreak competition that has been taking place recently and is quite popular. Read about the inspiration for the competition and why you might want to participate.  Read more...

How can you delete only some duplicates? Without Identity's, Temp tables, Cursors, loops or ROW_NUMBER()? Would you believe, go back to the 70's?  Read more...

Joe Celko comes back with a puzzle that isn't new, but one where the answer he originally gave now seems archaic: It is a deceptively simple problem, but is it true that the new features of SQL have simplified the solution? We leave it to the readers to provide the answer!   Read more...

Take the new challenge from MVP Jacob Sebastian. Deadline is next Monday.  Read more...

Our first Stumper sees Joe Celko providing a conundrum with a prize for anyone who can come up with a better solution than he can.  Read more...

Alex Kozak provides another SQL puzzle to hone your SQL Skills with.  Read more...

How can you delete only some duplicates? Without Identity's, Temp tables, Cursors, loops or ROW_NUMBER()? Would you believe, go back to the 70's?  Read more...

T-SQL does some things wonderfully, but cursors are the bane of the language, often causing performance issues. Changing your queries around to remove cursors can be tricky and new author Kamran Ali brings us one technique he has used to dramatically improve performance.   Read more...

Longtime SQL Server DBA and author Grant Fritchey decided to quiz his developers on how to perform some simple functions in T-SQL. Read about his results and see how you might do in taking his quiz.   Read more...

All of us need a steady stream of random passwords for the various systems we manage. Peter Larsson brings us an interesting T-SQL solution that generates one for us.   Read more...

While it's not likely that many of you need to find prime numbers using T-SQL, it is an interesting programming exercise. SQL Server guru Kathi Kellenburger brings us one solution after taking a break over the holidays and reading some popular fiction.   Read more...

A new puzzle that asks about implementing a powersum function.  Read more...

After a gap of sixteen months, Lionel Clarke, the creator of the only 3-D maze game to be written in TSQL, returns with a new SQL puzzle. It is very simple. You have to move as much of the data as you can from the source tables to the destination tables.   Read more...

A SQL puzzle from the SQL guru.  Read more...

An interesting puzzle from the Orlando SQL Server Users Group  Read more...

There are probably not many SQL Server DBAs that use the semicolon as a statement separator. In SQL Server 2005, this is required in certain places and new author Kenneth Powers brings us a look at where and why you need to use this syntax.   Read more...

Longtime SQL Server DBA and author Grant Fritchey decided to quiz his developers on how to perform some simple functions in T-SQL. Read about his results and see how you might do in taking his quiz.   Read more...

Chess makes a fantastic game for programming examples. You will find hundreds of examples on the internet. Some dedicated to OO patterns, others to algorithms and so forth. Unfortunately, most of these examples do not use a database or if they do, treat the database as nothing more than a storage repository. In this series of articles we will use SQL Server and T-SQL to implement the game of chess with an emphasis on thinking in sets.  Read more...