Query Exercise Answer: Generating Big TempDB Spills
In last week’s Query Exercise, I challenged you to play some code golf to generate big spills with tiny T-SQL.
2025-12-15
Additional Articles
How to Monitor and Optimize Batched Deletion Processes in SQL Server
Batched deletions are a common strategy in SQL Server to manage large datasets without overloading the system, but poorly tuned deletes can cause blocking, long-running transactions, and heavy log usage. Learn how to monitor and optimize these processes for smooth, efficient database performance.
2025-12-12
Running SQL Server in Local Containers with VSCode MSSQL Extension
You are a developer using SQL Server for your applications, and you need to quickly setup a local development environment. How can you make sure the environment is OS agnostic, so it can run on any operating system? Let’s see how we can quickly create a local container to run SQL Server using the VSCode MSSQL Extension.
2025-12-10
5 Strategies to Refactor SQL Code
Code refactoring is a common process when developing in procedural languages – and essential to developing high-quality code – yet somehow often gets overlooked in SQL.
2025-12-08
How to Query JSON Data Quickly in SQL Server, Part 2: SQL Server 2025
SQL Server 2025 and .NET 10 bring several new improvements to storing JSON natively in the database and querying it quickly.
2025-12-05
SQL Server DBaaS Vulnerability: Decrypting System Code & Exfiltrating User Data
Security in cloud environments is both challenging and fascinating, particularly for Database-as-a-Service (DBaaS) offerings like Amazon RDS, GCP CloudSQL and Alibaba ApsaraDB RDS. The cloud vendor acts as the system administrator, managing the operating system, patching, and backups, while the user manages their data and databases.
2025-12-03
Random Number Generator in SQL using Marsaglia Polar
How can we build a random number generator using Marsaglia Polar method in SQL Server without the use of external tools?
2025-12-01
Learn T-SQL Querying
Troubleshoot query performance issues, identify anti-patterns in your code, and write efficient T-SQL queries with this guide for T-SQL developers
2025-11-28 (first published: 2024-02-29)
4,596 reads
How to Query JSON Data Quickly in SQL Server, Part 1: Pre-2025
Before SQL Server 2025, if you want to store JSON data in Microsoft SQL Server or Azure SQL DB, and you want fast queries, the easiest way is to:
2025-11-28
SQL Declare Variable Code Examples
This tutorial will discuss using variables with SQL DECLARE along with various examples.
2025-11-26
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Question of the Day
The string_agg function
We create the following table and then insert some records in it:
create table t1 ( id int primary key, category char(1) not null, product varchar(50) ); insert into t1 values (1, 'A', 'Product 1'), (2, 'A', 'Product 2'), (3, 'A', 'Product 3'), (4, 'B', 'Product 4'), (5, 'B', 'Product 5');What happens if we execute the following query in both Sql Server and PostgreSQL?
select id,
category,
string_agg(product, ';')
over (partition by category order by id
rows between unbounded preceding and unbounded following) as stragg
from t1; See possible answers