I dig into the left anti semi join, comparing NOT IN, NOT EXISTS, OUTER APPLY, EXCEPT, and OUTER JOIN methods.

I discuss several aspects of DBCC CHECKDB and offer suggestions to minimize the impact this crucial operation can have.

SQLSentry is very proud to sponsor the 10th annual Women in Technology Luncheon at the PASS Summit. Probably 700 people in here – pretty crowded house. This luncheon is growing year over year and...

Douglas McDowell talks about day 1, the video montage featuring folks here from all over the world, and the fiscal year. The important point I took from this is that PASS is a not-for-profit...

Bill Graziano takes the stage at 8:15. He talks about how 3,894 attendees (and 5,611 total registrants) represent 57 countries at the 14th summit. There are over 127,000 members worldwide. Note that you can...

I had an incredibly interesting experience getting to Seattle this week. I flew out of Providence through Philadelphia. Apparently there was some smoke in one of the towers at PHL, so our flight was...

A lot of work went into improving estimates shown by an execution plan in Plan Explorer.

Tip : Auditing when Triggers are Disabled or Enabled for SQL Server

STATISTICS IO might not always tell the whole truth about data being read to process a query.

I follow up on an earlier post about trimming time from datetime, this time examining the performance characteristics of various methods without data access.

Tip : Script to create dynamic PIVOT queries in SQL Server

I show several reasons why you should stop using the sp_ prefix on stored procedures in SQL Server, including a performance hit.

This week there was a security release for all supported versions of SQL Server. Each version has 32-bit and 64-bit patches, and each version has GDR (General Distribution Release) and QFE (Quick-Fix Engineering) patches....

See if there is anything to gain by checking first if a particular column should be updated.

Hit-highlighting is a feature that many people wish Full-Text Search would support natively. See possible solutions.

I talk about the default cursor options in SQL Server and why you may want to override them.

Tip : Revisit your use of the SQL Server REMOTE join hint

Your data type choices can sometimes have more impact than you think.

Tip : Build a quota system for SQL Server user defined tables

There are lots of ways to remove time from a date, but most of them are extremely inefficient.

Tip : Recover access to a SQL Server instance

This post explores the performance characteristics of several solutions to the median problem.

Playing around today, I discovered that I was locked out of my local named instance using the Dedicated Administrator Connection. This post shows why and explains how you can avoid getting shut out of your own instance.

Sometimes it can make sense to check for potential errors and prevent them, instead of letting them happen.

Some interesting discussions always evolve around the topic of splitting strings; here I show splitting on the database side may not be necessary in the first place.

See how you can dynamically drive sort column and sort order.

There were a lot of comments following my post last week about string splitting, and I have tried to address those here.

This week I came across a case where DRY should be thrown out the window. There are other cases as well (for example, scalar functions), but this one was an interesting one involving Bitwise logic.

Tip : Removing the SQL Server Management Data Warehouse

I explore some common approaches people use to split strings, complete with performance analysis.