I was talking with a system admin on a recent trip and we got into what it means to have a really great work environment. It turned into a "what does it take" type discussion, as in "what does it take to have both support and a great environment that makes work that much better?" We seemed to come down […]

DATEFIRST Today I’m going to do a little rambling about the SQL Configuration Setting DATEFIRST. I was prompted to review this topic by a response from Joe stating that code I had posted from Maurice had an error. At first I thought Joe was incorrect, and that he had not taken into account the DATEFIRST configuration of his SQL Instance. […]

Wrapping up Cross Join Today Mark shares with us a perfect example of the real value of the CROSS join, or using the generic term Cartesian results, in an example defined by a dimension common in international finance reporting; Currency. The value of any currency can be translated into the value of any other kind of currency through exchange rates. […]

The Power of the CROSS JOIN I have been intrigued with the power of a Cartesian query ever since the days when we had to pull a power cord to kill a query someone had written doing a Cartesian query on two very large tables. A Cartesian query, implemented in TSQL by using a CROSS JOIN, results in joining all […]

TSQL Filtering Examples Today I wanted to demonstrate a couple simple scenarios where you have options for adding filtering criteria or where you must place the criteria in the JOIN clause. For my first example I want to return all the purchase orders having at least one Purchase Order Detail with an item of 154 (shoes). The following two queries […]

Combining Join and Filter Criteria I’m kinda shy when it comes to topics like this one. It borders on trolling for comments. The reason I have chosen this topic is because it has come up in recent conversation with developers moving to writing their own SQL, and wanting to understand the difference more fully. From that perspective I thought it […]

Filtering Data in SQL In early versions of SQL Server, ported into Windows by Microsoft from the Sybase code, both filtering and join criteria were coded in the WHERE clause. Here is a short example… SELECT … FROM PurchaseOrder po PurshaseOrderDetail pod WHERE po.PurchaseOrderID = pod.PurchaseOrderID AND po.CustomerID = @CustomerID As you can see the filter for the PurchaseOrder table […]

I’d really love to hear your opinion on this – email me at swynk@sswug.org – let me know. Are DBA roles becoming completely automated and "it just works?" I think that there are absolutely better tools now, and in many cases, the systems are in place to make sure your backups are good to go, that things are running well, […]

The Art of Programming I recently read a quote by Donald Knuth in the book “Coders at Work” by Peter Seibel. Knuth stated I’ve got thousands of pages and exercises, and I write it down and put it in the book so that I don’t have it all in my head. I have to come back to it and learn […]

Getting the Big Picture – Conclusion We’ve been considering how to determine system performance degradation in a distributed, service oriented world. We considered multi layered services, service oriented monitoring and sharded data monitoring. Today I want to talk about inconsistent performance. One of the hardest bugs for any developer to track down is the inconsistent bug; the bug that is […]