Uncategorized

For those of you who read my blog using RSS, you probably won’t even see this post, but either way. I’ve decided to move my blog to sqlblog.com. I have reposted some of my recent posts, but will not be posting any further content here at msmvps.com. Both the feed from msmvps.com and sqlblog.com use feedburner.com, so the old feed will continue working, but I recommend changing to the new one in case my blog disappears from msmvps one day. So farewell, msmvps.com (and thanks Susan!), it’s been fun. I’m sure I will still have many posts which link back … Continue reading A moving time…

[ Hi – this post can now be found at http://blogs.lobsterpot.com.au/2010/02/20/a-moving-time/

[ Hi – this post can now be found at http://blogs.lobsterpot.com.au/2010/02/13/t-sql-tuesday-003-relationships-the-round-up/

Lots of blog posts for this month, for the first T-SQL Tuesday to leave the safe-haven of Adam Machanic’s blog. Some people obviously missed out, probably because they don’t read this blog, but I guess that’s the nature of the meme. I don’t know who is hosting next month yet, but I’ll be looking out for Adam to post something about it in early March. All the posts had to appear as trackbacks or comments on the invitation to participate, but this post is a short summary for posterity. As the second week of February involves Valentine’s Day (and a … Continue reading T-SQL Tuesday #003 (Relationships): The round-up

I’m feeling the pressure for this month’s T-SQL Tuesday, probably because I’m also the host. I’ll be posting a roll-up for it soon too, which I’m sure will be great fun researching. Given that the topic is on relationships, and the main SQL Server database is a relational engine, relationships are incredibly relevant to databases. The idea behind RDBMSs is that keys are used to refer to entities. This leads to foreign keys, such that a particular column(s) is constrained to values which appear in another table, thus referential integrity is enforced. And yet there are so many database designs … Continue reading The Query Optimizer’s handling of Relationships for T-SQL Tuesday #003

[ Hi – this post can now be found at http://blogs.lobsterpot.com.au/2010/02/02/invitation-for-t-sql-tuesday-003-relationships/

[ Hi – this post can now be found at http://blogs.lobsterpot.com.au/2010/02/02/a-case-study-in-sargability/

It’s time for the third of Adam Machanic’s T-SQL Tuesdays, and this time, I’m the host. The first one, last December was on the topic of date/time, and the second was on Puzzling Situations. Check them both out, along with the round-ups that Adam wrote about them. Lots of great topics, which is starting to make me anticipate the content that comes out on the second Tuesday of each month. As an early volunteer to host, I have been given the honour of being the first person chosen to host one. I’d like to claim that this implies some sort … Continue reading Invitation for T-SQL Tuesday #003: Relationships

A recent discussion on Twitter about a query that Denny Cherry was looking at led to this post by Josef Richberg: http://josef-richberg.squarespace.com/journal/2010/1/28/is-a-case-statement-considered-sargable.html, and I thought it might be worth going through a few points on the topic of SARGability. Particularly given that I wrote a related post recently myself. If something is SARGable, it means it can be used as a Search Argument – that is, it can be used effectively in conjunction with an index. To repeat a common analogy, trying to find “Farley” in the phonebook is a Seek (I can pretty much go straight there), whereas trying … Continue reading A CASE study in SARGability

[ Hi – this post can now be found at http://blogs.lobsterpot.com.au/2010/01/22/sargable-functions-in-sql-server/