SQLServerCentral Article

Eliminating Cursors

T-SQL does some things wonderfully, but cursors are the bane of the language, often causing performance issues. Changing your queries around to remove cursors can be tricky and new author Kamran Ali brings us one technique he has used to dramatically improve performance.

External Article

Close these Loopholes - Reproduce Database Errors

This is the final part of Alex's ground-breaking series on unit-testing Transact-SQL code. Here, he shows how you can test the way that your application handles database-related errors such as constraint-violations or deadlocks. With a properly-constructed test-harness you can ensure that the end-user need never see the apparent gobbledegook of database system error messages, and that they are properly and robustly handled by the application.

Technical Article

Security Overview for Database Administrators

SQL Server 2008 is secure by design, default, and deployment. Microsoft is committed to communicating information about threats, countermeasures, and security enhancements as necessary to keep your data as secure as possible. This paper covers some of the most important security features in SQL Server 2008. It tells you how, as an administrator, you can install SQL Server securely and keep it that way, even as applications and users make use of the data stored within.

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BIT_COUNT() IV

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Question of the Day

BIT_COUNT() IV

In SQL Server 2025, I run this code:

select bit_count('A')
What is returned?

See possible answers