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Technical Article

Returning Sorted Record Sets Using the ORDER BY Clause

Having your data returned to you in some meaningful sorted order is important sometimes. If you don’t tell SQL Server you want to order the results of a SELECT statement then there is no guarantee that your result set will come back in a particular order. To make sure a result set is ordered you need to use the ORDER BY clause. In this article I will be exploring how to return an order result set by using the ORDER BY clause.

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2015-01-16

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Technical Article

Importance of Statistics and How It Works in SQL Server – Part 1

SQL Server Query Optimizer uses statistical information to estimate the cardinality in a query result. This enables the SQL Server Query Optimizer to create a high-quality query execution plan. Read on to learn how to use statistics and why it’s needed.

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2015-01-07

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Question of the Day

Symmetric Key Encryption

If I run this statement in SQL Server 2025, how is the password encrypted? 

CREATE SYMMETRIC KEY MySymmetricKey
WITH ALGORITHM = AES_256,
KEY_SOURCE = 'My secret key source passphrase',
IDENTITY_VALUE = 'My secret identity value'
ENCRYPTION BY PASSWORD = 'S&perS#cretP@ssword7';
GO

See possible answers