Optimizing a cursor based routine – Part 1

Learn how you can remove a cursor and optimize a routine that loops through a series of data and performs various calculations in this short article from Dave Ballantyne.

SELECT and WHERE without FROM

Date Time range

AVG function

Using a Variable for an IN Predicate

How to use a passed string variable for an IN type predicate in your queries as a way to more efficiently handle an array of strings.

The 5 First SQL Errors to Check For

Is your SQL query crashing? Nine times out of ten it will be for one of these 5 reasons!

Returning 0's in a SUM (SQL Spackle)

Learn how you can sum data by hour and by day while showing 0 values in your result sets for those time periods without a sum in this short article by Patrick Cahill.

3 SQL Join Concepts to Help You Choose the Right Join

What do SQL joins and the "teach a man to fish" Chinese proverb have in common? SQL joins, like regular expressions, are one of those commonplace programming tasks in which true success is entirely dependent upon your ability to conceptualize the outcome. Fail to do so and you'll likely wind up spending a few hours in a frustrating round of trial and error. Like regular expressions, the proliferation of online examples has actually contributed to the frustration, providing the equivalent of a day's worth of fish rather than the proverbial fishing pool.

GO

TIME Gentlemen please! The SQL Server temporal datatypes

If you are still using the old Sybase DateTime datatype, it is a good idea to move your code to the more standard datatypes that were introduced in SQL Server 2008. Joe Celko explains why, and walks through some of the history of the TSQL way of storing and manipulating dates and times.