SQLServerCentral Article

Day 1 at TechEd

It's not a SQL Server event, but SQL Server is a large part of it. TechEd is a huge conference and one of the premier events put on by Microsoft each year. Read about the first day with Andy, Brian, and Steve.

External Article

SQL Server 2005 System Tables and Views

When a SQL Server object is created, its properties are called metadata. The metadata is stored in special System Tables. For example, in SQL 2000, when a new column was created, the column name and data type could be found in an internal System Table called syscolumns. All SQL objects produce metadata. Every time SQL 2000 Enterprise Manager or SQL 2005 SQL Server Management Studio is browsed, the information displayed about database, tables, and all objects, comes from this metadata.

SQLServerCentral Article

Suggestions for Datatypes

SQL Server 2000 does a lot of things for the DBA, tuning, updating statistics, scheduling tasks, wizards and more. But one thing that it does not help with is choosing the correct data type for your data. New author Amit Lohia brings us a technique and some code that will examine your existing data and suggest places where another data type might be a better choice.

Technical Article

Using ANSI SQL as a Conceptual Hierarchical Data Modeling

This paper will explain and show how standard ANSI SQL processors can naturally model and automatically process complex multi-leg hierarchical data structures at a full conceptual hierarchical level. This also means the query user does not need to have structure knowledge of the hierarchical structures involved. The data modeling capability includes dynamically combining logical hierarchical relational and physical XML data structures at a full hierarchical level. This also includes the ability to link below the root of the lower level structure intuitively forming a valid unified hierarchical structure. As will be shown, ANSI SQL’s high level hierarchical data processing allows the flexible conceptual control of hierarchical node promotion, fragment processing, structure transformation, and variable structure creation.

External Article

Using CROSS APPLY in SQL Server 2005

My interest in writing this article was started by an MSDN article titled SQL Server 2005: The CLR Enters the Relational Stage. The article shows how to write a function that returns the top three countries per category. That's always been something that was difficult to do in SQL so I was curious about the approach. The article started out well but I was very unhappy by the end. It's just soooo much easier to do this in SQL Server 2005 using the new CROSS APPLY clause in Transact-SQL. So I'm going to write a query to return the top 3 orders for each customer and I'm going to do it in about 10 lines of SQL. (UPDATE: An alert reader found an even better approach!)

SQLServerCentral Article

Turbo for SQL Server

Searching data is an essential part of SQL Server applications, especially text searching. While Full Text Search in SQL Server 2000 works, it lacks some important features that Turbo for SQL Server can handle. Read this review of the product and see if this is a way you can enhance the search functions in your application.

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Question of the Day

Fun with JSON I

I have some data in a table:

CREATE TABLE #test_data
(
    id INT PRIMARY KEY,
    name VARCHAR(100),
    birth_date DATE
);

-- Step 2: Insert rows  
INSERT INTO #test_data
VALUES
(1, 'Olivia', '2025-01-05'),
(2, 'Emma', '2025-03-02'),
(3, 'Liam', '2025-11-15'),
(4, 'Noah', '2025-12-22');
If I run this query, how many rows are returned?
SELECT *
FROM OPENJSON(
     (
         SELECT t.* FROM #test_data AS t FOR JSON PATH
     )
             ) t;

See possible answers