Overview In SQL Server, indexing is a technique used to improve the performance of queries by reducing the amount of data that SQL Server needs to scan. You can think of it like a table of contents in a book—it helps SQL Server find data more quickly. In this article, we will cover the following […]
Evolution of code The thing with any bit of code that has been around for a while, is that when change comes along, the tendency is to cater for the change by adding new stuff, while nothing gets taken away. Some stuff has definitely been taken away from this Date Dimension, but some historical artefacts […]
Introduction Sometimes we face the scenario in an enterprise environment that the database in SQL Server Always On Availability Group (AOAG) has high concurrency read and write access from application servers. If we keep using the one network interface card for both network traffic of database connections from application servers and database mirroring between AOAG […]
This Friday Steve Jones wonders about the upper limits for what you may learn in a year.
Helping people solve T-SQL problems is one of my favorite hobbies. Someone messaged me the other day with a complex query that was almost complete except for one issue. He needed to perform a LEFT OUTER JOIN but had to filter based on a value from the right table. However, when he added the filter, SQL removed rows from the left table. The task was to decide where to place the SQL predicate: in the ON or WHERE clause.
Steve has a few thoughts on the lack of data sovereignty in the cloud, with an outlook that isn't very positive.
Learn about delayed durability in SQL Server and how it might help you with a heavily loaded server.
In Part 2, we shift focus from theory to practice. We will explore how organizations can harmoniously integrate both practi: the agility of DevOps and the resilience of SRE. During integration, it requires deliberate changes to culture, tooling, metrics, and collaboration patterns.
Here's a teaser about Azure SQL Managed Instance, which isn't quite PaaS or IaaS, but isn't as locked down as you might think. This is the introduction to a three part series to follow.
By Steve Jones
This is timely, as I’m currently on a boat in the Adriatic taking a...
You can find the slides and SQL scripts for my session “Spice up your...
By SQLPals
How to Clear the SSMS Cache (SSMS 21 and Later) Updated...
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Using CHOOSE()
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We have this code that sets some status values and then queries them using the CHOOSE() function in SQL Server 2025.
CREATE TABLE Status
(
StatusID INT,
StatusDescription VARCHAR(20)
);
GO
INSERT dbo.Status
(
StatusID,
StatusDescription
)
VALUES
(0, 'Uncategorized'),
(1, 'Active'),
(2, 'Inactive'),
(3, 'Temp');
GO
SELECT CHOOSE(StatusID, 'Unknown', 'Active', 'Inactive', 'Temporary')
FROM Status;
When the SELECT runs, what is returned? See possible answers