The Many Uses of Coalesce in SQL Server

Many times people come across the Coalesce function and think that it is just a more powerful form of ISNULL. In actuality, I have found it to be one of the most useful functions with the least documentation. In this tip, I will show you the basic use of Coalesce and also some features you probably never new existed.

Missing Date Ranges- the Sequel

Alex Kozak returns with another Date puzzle. A question from a Simple-Talk reader gives Alex the inspiration to see if is possible to list unused date ranges in one Select statement.

Recursive Queries using Common Table Expressions (CTE) in SQL Server

The problem arises when the hierarchy level increases as SQL Server is limited to 32 levels of recursion. We need a better way to implement recursive queries in SQL Server 2005. How do we do it?

TABLESAMPLE

The Curse and Blessings of Dynamic SQL

How you use dynamic SQL, when you should - and when you should not.

ALL

Calculating Age

T-SQL calculations can get tricky at times, and since you often work with multiple rows, it's good to be exact in your data manipulation. New author Lynn Pettis brings us an article about calculating ages.

Windowed Aggregate functions

Sort Order - Include Null al last

T-SQL Data Processing

This article from new author Peter Kierstead shows us how to implement your own "fuzzy" dedup/merge logic without resorting to RBAR in T-SQL.