It takes as little as one word. One word from a co-worker, blog commenter, or Stack Overflow user can make you feel like a champ. (Or a chump, depending on the word.)
(Let's focus on feeling like a champ.)
Here's a handy flowchart for whenever you find yourself worrying about fragmentation:
*Talk to your doctor about whether fragmentation is a problem for you. Seek help for index maintenance lasting longer than four hours. Serious side effects may occur if all index maintenance is ignored completely.
Dynamic SQL can be an incredibly powerful tool in the pocket of a SQL Server developer. Developers frequently express amazement at the level of flexibility dynamic SQL offers, an astonishment at how quickly things get out of hand, and finally the humbling realization that such machinery nearly tore their limbs off. This process can be…
You spend at least an hour or two each day writing T-SQL code. You have a pretty good hunch that it's not as fast or crisp as it should be, and you wonder if you're missing a few techniques. You've heard about date tables and windowing functions, but you're just not comfortable with 'em yet.
I recently came across a curious case where a SQL Server was suffering a number of long-running queries coming from an application written in Entity Framework. When I measured the average query execution times, I got some unexpected results:
CPU time: 12 milliseconds
Reads: 273
Elapsed time: 6800 milliseconds
I've been doing SQL Critical Care® work with clients for over a year now. It's absolutely true that every client's situation is different and needs special attention. However, I've found that there's a short list of issues that nearly all clients have in common. Drawing from that list, here are the top three high-impact, low-effort areas you can work…
When it comes to hiring a SQL Server developer, we can pepper candidates with HR-type questions ("Tell me about a time when you had a conflict with a co-worker and how you resolved it.") but that doesn't give us a good sense of a developer's T-SQL skill level. Here are five questions that will give you a good idea how experienced and skilled a developer is.
Over the years, I've done all kinds of awful things with T-SQL and made countless mistakes. Some were harmless; others were borderline catastrophic (exciting times!). I was curious what kind of horrible mistakes other people make, so I threw the question out to Twitter. Every answer I got was unique, which was both telling (so…
As a developer, one of the things I can no longer live without is a date table. Who wants to type DATENAME and DATEPART over and over again? Not this guy, and once you have a date table, you won't want to either.
In this 16-minute video, I'll give you four reasons why you should stop writing so many date functions and concatenations, and start looking them up in a table instead.
In this 5-minute video, Doug tells about the time he deleted the Reporting Services encryption key, and what it took to fix the damage. You'll learn about what the SSRS encryption key protects, as well when to:
Back up the encryption key
Restore the encryption key
Change the encryption key
Delete the encryption key
You've been querying comparative numbers like Year To Date and Same Period Last Year by using tedious CTEs and subqueries. Beginning with SQL Server 2012, getting these numbers is easier than ever! Join Doug for a 30-minute T-SQL tune-up using window functions that will cut down dramatically on the amount of code you need to write.
