An Urgent Ad Hoc Report

In this new article, Yakov Shlafman shows us how he wrote a quick ad hoc report of expenses so that he could leave on time one day.

T-SQL: Why “It Depends”

Why does everyone use "it depends" as an answer to many T-SQL questions? Bob Hovious brings us a short example of how performance can change based on data loads for the same code.

What's the count?

COUNT_BIG

Procedural, Semi-Procedural and Declarative Programming in SQL

A lot of the time, the key to making SQL databases perform well is to take a break from the keyboard and rethink the way of approaching the problem; and rethinking in terms of a set-based declarative approach. Joe takes a simple discussion abut a problem with a UDF to illustrate the point that ingrained procedural reflexes can often prevent us from seeing simpler set-based techniques.

Cast vs. Convert

Counting spaces with datalength

Randomizing Result Sets with NEWID

Seth Delconte brings us a technique to solve a common request. Using the NEWID function to return a random record from a result set.

Numeric or Not Numeric

Tips for Simplifying Crosstab Query Statements

Rob Gravelle takes a complex SQL statement and shows you several ways to re-write it that both simplifies and shortens it, while still yielding the same results.