Stairway to T-SQL: Beyond The Basics Level 1: The TOP Clause
The first topic in this stairway will be discussing the TOP clause. The TOP clause allows you to control the number of rows to be returned or affected by a query.
Stairway to T-SQL: Beyond The Basics Level 2: Writing Subqueries
In this level of the Beyond the T-SQL Basics stairway, we will be discussing the different aspects of a subquery.
Stairway to T-SQL: Beyond The Basics Level 4: Using Views to Simplify Your Query
This level discusses how to use a database VIEW to simplify your Transact-SQL(T-SQL) code. By understanding how to use a VIEW you will be able to better support writing T-SQL code to meet complex business requirements. In this article I will be discussing what a database VIEW is and then providing a number of examples to help you understand how you can use a VIEW to implement different coding scenarios.
Stairway to T-SQL: Beyond The Basics Level 5: Storing Data in Temporary Tables
There are times when retrieving data for complex business requirement requires you to temporarily store one or more results sets for a short period of time. Typically these temporary tables are stored in the scope of the current connection, but they may also need to be available across multiple connections.
Stairway to T-SQL: Beyond The Basics Level 6: Using the CASE Expression and IIF Function
There are times where you need to write a single T-SQL statement that is able to return different T-SQL expressions based on the evaluation of another expression. When you need this kind of functionality you can use the CASE expression or IIF function to meet this requirement. In this Stairway level Gregory Larsen reviews the CASE and IIF syntax and showing you examples of how the CASE expression and IIF function.
Stairway to T-SQL: Beyond The Basics Level 8: Coding Shortcuts using += and -= Operators
No one wants to use more keystrokes than they have to when they write a chunk of T-SQL code. To help with minimizing the number of characters a T-SQL developer needs to type the Microsoft team introduced three new shortcuts operators when they release SQL Server 2008. These shorts cuts are the String Concatenation, Add EQUALS, and the Subtract EQUALS operators.
Stairway to T-SQL: Beyond The Basics Level 9: Dynamic T-SQL Code
There times when you need to write T-SQL code that creates specific T-SQL Code and executes it. When you do this you are creating dynamic T-SQL code. When writing dynamic T-SQL you need to understand how dynamic code opens the possibilities for a SQL injection attack.
Stairway to XML: Level 1 - Introduction to XML
In this level, Rob Sheldon explains what XML is, and describes the components of an XML document, Elements and Attributes. He explains the basics of tags, entity references, enclosed text, comments and declarations
Stairway to XML: Level 2 - The XML Data Type
Robert Sheldon describes SQL Server's XML Data Type, and shows that it is as easy to configure a variable, column, or parameter with the XML data type as configuring one of these objects with any other datatype
Stairway to XML: Level 4 - Querying XML Data
You can extract a subset of data from an XML instance by using the query() method, and you can use the value() method to retrieve individual element and attribute values from an XML instance.
Blogs
Who Are You Doing It For?
By Brian Kelley
But as I've matured over the years, I came to realize that I needed...
Presenting Twice in May 2026
By alevyinroc
I will be presenting my latest session, Documenting Your Work for Worry-Free Vacations, in-person...
Finding the Next Sequence Value: #SQLNewBlogger
By Steve Jones
I saw a question asking about the next sequence value and decided to try...
Forums
Auto Update Statistics not triggering on filtered indexes
I've got a table with 186,703,969 rows, about 300GB of data. There are several...
What is the difference between SQL Server and SQL Database?
I created a SQL Database in Azure Portal but I've just noticed it also...
An Unusual Identity
Comments posted to this topic are about the item An Unusual Identity
Question of the Day
An Unusual Identity
What values are returned when I run this code?
CREATE TABLE dbo.IdentityTest2
(
id NUMERIC(10,0) IDENTITY(10,10) PRIMARY KEY,
somevalue VARCHAR(20)
)
GO
INSERT dbo.IdentityTest2
(
somevalue
)
VALUES
( 'Steve')
, ('Bill')
GO
SELECT top 10
id
FROM dbo.IdentityTest2 See possible answers