Category: sql server

Just an idea: Bare Bones SQL

I’m reading Andy Warren’s excellent essay “Thoughts on raising funds and spending funds for PASS chapters”, and it’s bringing together a bunch of long-stewed thoughts. Simply: What if there’s room for “Bare Bones” SQL user groups? The bare bones basics of Bare Bones SQL For those who don’t want to read a huge essay, the […]

Tip: Concatenate rows with XML, or COALESCE

Edit: I went and changed the first query without paying close enough attention. I’ve fixed the explanation and the query. Concatenate rows with XML I still reference my Forgotten T-SQL Cheat Sheet, especially for the XML trick that turns a set of rows into a list. The T-SQL Cheat Sheet example uses a parent-child table combination, […]

Why don’t they make the optimizer faster? (An essay on nested views)

We got a question recently that basically boiled down to this: Nested views shouldn’t be such a performance suck. Why doesn’t Microsoft make the optimizer deal with nested views better? We’ve looked into this a good deal – nested views are one of my pet peeves, and I’ve blogged about it at least a couple of times (see Detangling Nested Views and […]