Sometimes, in the quest for raw SQL performance, you are forced to sacrifice legibility and maintainability of your code, unless you then document your code lavishly. Phil Factor's SQL Speed Phreak challenge produced some memorable code, but can SQL features introduced since then help to produce code that performs as well and is also easy to understand? Kathi Kellenberger investigates.
2016-04-15
5,825 reads
Code coverage is a practice that goes hand in hand with automated testing, reporting the percentage of your code that has been exercised during a test run. Ed Elliott and Redgate have partnered to make a code coverage tool available for SQL Server, both free and open source. SQL Cover measures the coverage of your SQL Server stored procedures and functions. It has built-in support for the popular tSQLt unit testing framework, but can also be used alongside any automated testing framework of your choosing. Find out more in this blog post.
2016-04-14
4,457 reads
Paul White shows how an update may fail when a partition has some data on a read-only filegroup, and explains several workarounds.
2016-04-13
2,455 reads
Learn about deadlocks and how you might better troubleshoot the issues involved.
2016-04-12
5,177 reads
The 2015/16 Simple-Talk Awards have concluded, the votes have been counted and recounted, and the winners have now been announced.
2016-04-12
2,372 reads
With the new temporal table feature, SQL Server 2016 internally manages two tables: a base table, which contains the latest data all the time, and a history table, which contains a history of all of the changes. Arshad Ali looks at the new feature, how it works, and how to either create a new table with this feature or enable it for an existing table.
2016-04-11
4,139 reads
With database deployments, not all script-based processes are equal. Some use change scripts in a free-and-easy way, and some, which are normally called ‘migrations-based approaches’, have more discipline around them. In this article, Redgate Product Manager Elizabeth Ayer covers ‘migrations’, and shows some of the benefits that have come with new tooling which is specifically designed to assist the change script processes.
2016-04-08
3,078 reads
Dynamic Data Masking allows you to obscure your confidential data column values at the database engine level for both new and existing SQL Server data. Being able to alter the definition of an existing column to add a masking rule makes it very simple to obscure your existing column values without even changing your application code.
2016-04-07
4,873 reads
SQL Server 2016 RC0 introduces a new native string splitting function, STRING_SPLIT. In this article, Aaron Bertrand compares its performance to existing methods.
2016-04-06
4,076 reads
Once more Simple-Talk invites its readers to vote on the top nominations for the Simple-Talk Awards. Find out who or what has been nominated for each of this year's nine categories, and cast your vote to decide the winners - voting closes tomorrow!
2016-04-05
2,523 reads
By ReviewMyDB
Index maintenance has always meant nightly jobs and a window you have to defend....
I’m sure you’ve all heard the tale of Goldilocks and the Three Bears, but...
By Steve Jones
One of the things I’ve been requesting for a number of years is cost...
Comments posted to this topic are about the item SQL Art, Part 4: Happy...
Comments posted to this topic are about the item SQL Server Still Wins
Comments posted to this topic are about the item DBCC CHECKDB Limits I
I have this data in the dbo.Commission table in a SQL Server 2022 database.
salesperson commission Brian 12 Brian 16 Andy 7 Andy 14 Andy 21 Steve 20 Steve NULLAll the data is a varchar, and I decide to run this query to get the totals for each salesperson.
SELECT SalesPerson
, AVG(TRY_PARSE(Commission AS int)) AS TotalCommission
FROM commission
GROUP BY SalesPerson
GO
What average commission is calculated for Steve? See possible answers