Articles

Technical Article

Slow in the Application, Fast in SSMS? Understanding Performance Mysteries

When I read various forums about SQL Server, I frequently see questions from deeply mystified posters. They have identified a slow query or stored procedure in their application. They cull the SQL batch from the application and run it in SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) to analyse it, only to find that the response is instantaneous. At this point they are inclined to think that SQL Server is all about magic. A similar mystery is when a developer has extracted a query in his stored procedure to run it stand-alone only to find that it runs much faster – or much slower – than inside the procedure.

2011-03-07

5,326 reads

SQLServerCentral Article

Concatenating Rows

Often in database design we store different values in rows to take advantage of a normalized design. However many times we need to combine multiple rows of data into one row for a report of some sort. New author Carl P. Anderson brings us some interesting T-SQL code to accomplish this.

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2011-03-04 (first published: )

150,399 reads

External Article

Look-up Tables in SQL

Lookup tables can be a force for good in a relational database. Whereas the 'One True Lookup Table' remains a classic of bad database design, an auxiliary table that holds static data, and is used to lookup values, still has powerful magic. Joe Celko explains....

2011-03-04

7,435 reads

Technical Article

T-SQL Quiz 2011

The 2011 edition of MVP Jacob Sebastian's T-SQL Quiz is underway. You can take part in the quiz each day, submitting your answers for the chance to show off your knowledge and perhaps win some prizes.

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2011-03-04

4,394 reads

External Article

How To Use Regular Expressions for Data Validation and Cleanup

You need to provide data validation at the server level for complex strings like phone numbers, email addresses, etc. You may also need to do data cleanup / standardization before moving it from source to target. Although SQL Server provides a fair number of string functions, the code developed with these built-in functions can become complex and hard to maintain or reuse.

2011-03-03

15,100 reads

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Question of the Day

BIT_COUNT() IV

In SQL Server 2025, I run this code: 

select bit_count('A')
What is returned?

See possible answers