The SQL MERGE statement offers convenience, safety and elegance, but how does it perform compared to other methods?  Read more...

Putting a column name in a COUNT() function may not always give you what you are looking for.  Read more...

How to remove identify and remove duplicate data from your tables  Read more...

Sometimes we have a T-SQL process that we need to run that takes some time to run or we want to run it during idle time on the server. We could create a SQL Agent job manually, but is there any simple way to create a scheduled job?  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...

If you've never encountered this quirk of the SQL UPDATE statement, you should take a look and find a simple way around it.  Read more...

Finding circular references that are stopping your CTE from working.  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...

Specialized tasks like cryptography require external libraries that are not available in SQL Server. Methods for such tasks can be compiled in a .NET language and deployed to SQL Server as a CLR assembly where the assembly's methods can be referenced by SQL Server stored procedures and functions.  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...

Not all SQL-generated scripts are created equal (or correctly) for alternative schema-owned objects.  Read more...

Understanding thousands of lines of code of an existing database is very time-consuming and tedious, prone to inadvertent oversight of key logic points. We are looking at advanced ways to provide greater insight into your code base while reducing the numerous demands placed on the developer. Please help us by completing this short survey to help us define the requirements.  Read more...

Learn how to generate lists of column values from multiple rows by grouping and using a recursive CTE. This is a very flexible and easy implementation, compared to using cursors or PIVOT operators.  Read more...

Make your comment blocks much more useful, in a surprising number of ways  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...

Understanding the basics of how T-SQL logic works in branching is important to ensure you code works as expected. This article will help you learn how this impacts control of flow language.   Read more...

Create a professional looking HTML table from T-SQL, not SSRS.  Read more...

This article shows how to implement low cost custom sequence numbering logic via a cunning use of the the ROW_NUMBER() function  Read more...

Greg Larsen shares a number of different TSQL methods to provide paging functionality, for when your application requires that you display only one page of data at a time.  Read more...

Greg Larsen shares a number of different TSQL methods to provide paging functionality, for when your application requires that you display only one page of data at a time.  Read more...