Yeah. I'm actually working on comparing MAX, TOP and ROW_NUMBER. I was hoping to outline which might be better when.

Ah, partition by... crud. I was bouncing all around it and I just couldn't figure it out. That looks great. I tested it against the single row and large set...

You'll need to look at the queries being run and determine what the most likely access paths are for your data. There you'll want to put indexes. After that initial...

Since backups are just from committed transactions, I doubt you can move the log in that manner. Can't the Log Explorer read from log backups directly? I'm pretty sure the...

Itzik was doing it on demand. It wasn't hard either. He just had to get the queries to run against similar sets of data and he could force the issue...

Actually, according to Itzik Ben Gan and some pretty convincing tests (he gave the presentation at the last PASS Summit), NOLOCK can result in duplicate and incorrect data because it...

The short answer is, it depends. The longer answer is, that in some cases, yes, it makes a huge difference to put the filters into the JOIN instead of the...

Check the execution plan. I'll be you're seeing tons of table or index scans.

You can't join outside the OUTPUT clause, but since you've put the records into a table variable (you might want to use a temp table for this instead) you can...

Just to be a bit contrarian, I agree with Jeff & Gail on TableA, but on Table B, I'd look at making the foreign key value from TableA the leading...

Have you looked at the execution plan? You need to identify where the bottlenecks are occuring in order to know where to go to work. The others have pointed out...

I'm working up a comparison between TOP, MAX and ROW_NUMBER that addresses this problem. You can use all three. They have different strengths and weaknesses. You can use them as...

I'm working from home today so I don't have all my reference material at hand. If I miss a detail here & there, someone will correct me.

Select statements put a...

Sorry, I guess I wasn't clear, you don't need an UPDLOCK on the UPDATE because that's what it does. For example, and this is a bit contrived, you need to...

A select creates shared locks on the table. If you want to limit access as part of a single transaction, a good idea, you need to put a UPDLOCK hint...