tl;dr The title says it all. Prologue One of the keys to my personal learning is that, very early in my database career, I taught myself how to make lot’s of rows of Random Constrained Data in a comparatively short time. With the help of a few good folks over time, the method has been […]
2026-09-07 (first published: 2023-09-18)
5,602 reads
BULK INSERT and BCP are powerful, high performance tools for importing text files. SQL Server MVP Jeff Moden gives us several nifty tips in this introduction to BULK INSERT and BCP Format Files including "Skipping Columns" and the sequestration of bad rows while still loading all the good data.
2024-11-22 (first published: 2014-01-23)
25,789 reads
SQL Server MVP Jeff Moden shows us a quick and dirty bit of SQL Spackle to display the content of VARCHAR(MAX) and NVARCHAR(MAX).
2024-10-04 (first published: 2011-01-27)
24,422 reads
Learn how you can query a hierarchy of data and also return the results in an ordered fashion. A handy T-SQL skill that you will use over and over again.
2024-08-02 (first published: 2011-03-10)
24,314 reads
In Unix, a timestamp is a whole number that represents a date and time. Learn how we can convert those correctly in SQL Server.
2022-11-15 (first published: 2022-09-14)
56,610 reads
Many people have used a "Numbers" or "Tally" table without really knowing what it does. This is an introduction as to how a Tally table replaces a loop.
2022-09-05 (first published: 2008-05-07)
157,795 reads
What's the true and permanent cost of lowering the Fill Factor of an index in SQL Server? It's a lot more than many people think. 9 year SQL Server MVP veteran, Jeff Moden, demonstrates how to calculate the extra space that will be used by lowering the Fill Factor and saved by increasing it.
2021-05-28 (first published: 2019-09-03)
10,412 reads