I'm not sure there's actually a substantial performance difference between the two methods.

Note that the TallyN query as written will always avoid doing the last letter of each...

sys.dm_xe_sessions only shows active sessions, I believe.

Try sys.server_event_sessions instead.

Cheers!

EDIT: Got distracted while typing it up, and Sue beat me to it 🙂

Just to be clear, dir and list.files both do this, and are actually identical. 

See, for example, https://stackoverflow.com/questions/42959759/what-is-the-difference-between-list-files-and-dir.

This is also shown in the documentation linked in the...

If the only things we care about are getting the ID and the desired score and being concise, and don't have any NULLs (fairly artificial, but hey :)), here's...

Just to pile on, in general, you should figure out why the log is growing before doing anything else. Also, the mere fact that the log is growing is not...

In my opinion, this question already has one of the best internet SQL Server answers I've ever seen.

I'd highly recommend reading Martin Smith's answer to this at https://dba.stackexchange.com/questions/16385/whats-the-difference-between-a-temp-table-and-table-variable-in-sql-server

Glad to help!

It's a common technique to satisfy cross tab/pivot requirements.

You can see some explanation of that with links to some articles about it at https://www.sqlservercentral.com/Forums/1522400/Why-we-used-Aggregate-function-in-pivot-and-cross-tab-queries-,...

Something like this might work for you:

SELECT [Name]=     @@SERVERNAME,
       [Version]= SERVERPROPERTY('productversion'),
       [ProdLevel]=SERVERPROPERTY('productlevel'),
   ...

Just to make sure I understand the requirements correctly, a row only shows up on the report if both _F and _C for a particular step are NULL?

Cheers!

This wouldn't work.

Temporary tables created in dynamic SQL can't be referenced by the parent batch.

The reverse can be done. You can create a temporary table in...

Yeah, they've been saying it's high on their list for a while now (see https://connect.microsoft.com/SQLServer/feedback/details/758588/full-text-leading-wildcard-suffix-search, for example), but hasn't been done yet as far as I know.

The documentation...