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Managing the "Surface Area" of SQL Server 2005

As every developer knows by now, Microsoft has focused renewed attention on security in recent product releases. One of the important concepts in this effort is surface area. Roughly speaking, a piece of software has a smaller surface area if there are fewer ways to attack it: fewer open ports, fewer APIs, fewer protocols, and so on. OSQL Server 2005 takes this concept to the next level by letting you explicitly manage the software's surface area.

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Using Ranking and Windowing Functions in SQL Server 2005

SQL Server 2005 is chock full of new features. You may have heard that you can write stored procedures in a CLR language like C# or VB .NET, but TSQL is here to stay. One new great feature adds the functionality of a Ranking expression that can be added to your result set that is based on a ranking algorithm being applied to a column that you specify. This will come in handy in .NET applications for paging and sorting in a grid as well as many other scenarios. We are going to take a look at the Ranking functions new to SQL Server 2005 using the new AdventureWorks database on the February 2005 Community Tech Preview.

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Fun with JSON II

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Question of the Day

Fun with JSON II

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 t1.[key] AS row,
       t2.*
FROM OPENJSON(
     (
         SELECT t.* FROM #test_data AS t FOR JSON PATH
     )
             ) t1
    CROSS APPLY OPENJSON(t1.value) t2;

See possible answers