Effective Strategies for Storing and Parsing XML in SQL Server

XML is a common storage format for data, metadata, parameters, or other semi-structured data. Because of this, it often finds its way into SQL Server databases and needs to be managed alongside other data types.

Query Exercise: Beat ChatGPT at Finding Good Question Times

What are the best days of the week and times of the day to post a question at StackOverflow.com?

The CHECK() Constraint

One of the many ways a relational table differs from the file structures used by pre-relational storage systems is that the tables, rows and columns can have constraints on them. This allows you to reduce the types of bad data that can be loaded into your tables.

Sensitivity Ranks

Operator Precedence Order

Snake draft sorting in SQL Server, part 4

In the previous posts in this series (part 1, part 2, part 3), I described how I have optimized a long-running set of routines by processing databases, tables, and even subsets of tables in parallel. This leads to many separate jobs that all kick off at roughly the same time

Is date zero valid and if so what day is it?

Snake draft sorting in SQL Server, part 3

In part 2 of this series, I showed an example implementation of distributing a long-running workload in parallel, in order to finish faster. In reality, though, this involves more than just restoring databases. And I have significant skew to deal with: one database that is many times larger than all the rest and has a higher growth rate.

Who’s Changing the Table? Answers and Discussion

Your challenge for this week was to find out who keeps mangling the contents of the AboutMe column in the Stack Overflow database.

The "ORDER BY" clause behavior