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

Snake draft sorting in SQL Server, part 2

In my previous post, I showed how to borrow a snake draft concept from fantasy football, or a packing technique from the shipping industry, to distribute different portions of a workload to run in parallel.

Snake draft sorting in SQL Server, part 1

I recently had a restore job where I needed to split the work up into multiple parallel processes (which I’ll refer to here as “threads”). I wanted to balance the work so that the duration was something significantly less than the sum of the restore times

SQL Logic

In this article, I will discuss the history and thinking behind several types of logic that are typically associated with writing relational database code.

Does Your GROUP BY Order Matter?

Sometimes when you do GROUP BY, the order of the columns does matter. For example, these two SELECT queries produce different results:

Pagination and ordering by large values

Pagination is a technique for limiting output. Think of Google search results, shopping the electronics category on Amazon, or browsing tagged questions on Stack Overflow. Nobody could consume all of the results in a single shot, and no site wants to spend the resources required to present them all to us