Additional Articles


External Article

A Rolling Filtered Index in SQL Server

I recently resolved an issue where a query pulling data from the last 30 days would time out due to the table’s size and the lack of a supporting index. Creating a supporting index is possible, but not ideal; it will be very large and may not be useful for most queries and use cases. I wonder how I could implement a filtered index that follows time and is always limited to the last n days.

2025-09-10

External Article

How to Script Dimensions with data build tool (dbt) Macros

In this article, we’ll revisit the dimension models we created. We wrote the entire SQL statement for the dimension by hand, and the dimensions themselves were very rudimentary; they lacked a surrogate key and there were no audit columns (such as insert date and update date). We’ll show you how we can expand the dimensions using Jinja, but also how we can minimize development effort by baking reusable patterns into the Jinja code.

2025-09-03

External Article

Picking the ON or WHERE Clause for the SQL Predicate

Helping people solve T-SQL problems is one of my favorite hobbies. Someone messaged me the other day with a complex query that was almost complete except for one issue. He needed to perform a LEFT OUTER JOIN but had to filter based on a value from the right table. However, when he added the filter, SQL removed rows from the left table. The task was to decide where to place the SQL predicate: in the ON or WHERE clause.

2025-09-01

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Parameter Sensitive Plan Optimization in SQL Server 2022

By Deepam Ghosh

Comments posted to this topic are about the item Parameter Sensitive Plan Optimization in...

Minimum Change Tracking Retention

By Steve Jones - SSC Editor

Comments posted to this topic are about the item Minimum Change Tracking Retention

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Question of the Day

Minimum Change Tracking Retention

If I am running this code:

ALTER DATABASE AdventureWorks2017 SET CHANGE_TRACKING = ON (CHANGE_RETENTION=xxx);
What is the minimum amount of time I can set?

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