He admits it wasn't his idea but his head sure wishes it was. SQL Server MVP Jeff Moden explains a wonderful, super simple, very high performance formula that will calculate ISO Week Numbers. If you're "stuck" with SQL Server 2005 or less, you're going to like this a whole lot!  Read more...

The SQL MERGE statement can make your DML querying more efficient but you need to take care or you may get burned  Read more...

The goal of this article to show how to get unique transactions per client per month from the data set containing multiple transactions per client per month.   Read more...

Pivoting SQL Server tables is always awkward, even with the PIVOT and UNPIVOT operators. If you want to get the job done without GROUP BY or PIVOT, here is a way to do it using only REPLACE.  Read more...

This article brings you a technique and framework to use in your stored procedures that can allow you to re-throw and log errors.  Read more...

When compared with HASHBYTES, CHECKSUM, has a number of drawbacks. Hence, a question that comes up is: Is Checksum really required? In this article, I attempt to answer that question.  Read more...

Learn how to search for a value throughout all database tables.  Read more...

For enterprise systems, purging data is a reality. Today, we will see some strategies that I recently implemented to make this process work efficiently.  Read more...

How to delete millions of rows with virtually no contention.  Read more...

How to use a passed string variable for an IN type predicate in your queries as a way to more efficiently handle an array of strings.  Read more...

Need to understand new data? This article explains why - and how you can profile it efficiently  Read more...

Auditing, conflict resolution, tamper & concurrency protection are some of the most common requirements for any enterprise system – this 2-part series presents an in-depth look at the various change detection mechanisms available within SQL Server.  Read more...

Greg Larsen explores the new SQL Server 2012 date and time functions and shows you how to exploit these functions in new application code.  Read more...

Auditing, conflict resolution, tamper & concurrency protection are some of the most common requirements for any enterprise system – this 2-part series presents an in-depth look at the various change detection mechanisms available within SQL Server.  Read more...

This article describes a T-SQL procedure to insert data using the SSIS Data Pump  Read more...

There are certain circumstances where SQL Server will silently truncate data, without providing an error or warning, before it is inserted into a table. In this tip we cover some examples of when this occurs.  Read more...

Despite NTEXT and TEXT being deprecated in SQL Server for some time they are still both used in production systems. In this article, I will briefly demonstrate the difference between a VARCHAR (MAX), NVARCHAR (MAX) and the NTEXT data types, and the impact on performance from using NTEXT/TEXT.  Read more...

The final level of this stairway looks at the MERGE statement in detail, focusing on how to perform insert, update and delete logic using the MERGE statement.  Read more...

Following on from the previous TSQL performance tuning article in this series, we now focus on the important topic of T-SQL “Not IN” And “Not Exists “  Read more...

This article shows how you can use a TSQL semaphore in SSIS.  Read more...