(Derik Hammer) I have heard a few different beliefs regarding how to write T-SQL queries when using the COUNT() function.

(Kenneth Fisher) This isn’t so much of a best practice, it comes more under the heading of being careful. Let’s say you have a DELETE statement (or UPDATE) that you need to run. You can certainly put it in a transaction.

(Pinal Dave) Some error messages are a great source of troubleshooting when things go wrong. I always request my blog readers to read what the error messages are conveying. Most of the solutions are very much documented as part of the message. I must agree that over the years the error messages have

(Jason Brimhall) SQL Server is full of good stuff. There are plenty of features to be used. Plenty of applications to help it. And there is even plenty of metadata within SQL Server to help you better understand your data and the queries that are being run.

(Larry Leonard) Instant file initialization is a wonderful feature of the Windows file system – not of SQL Server, please note — that allows the server to allocate disk pages without having to set each bit to zero.

(Ed Elliott) I generally write T-SQL code in SSDT (Sql Server Data Tools) and find that I often publish to my local database instance and then test the actual code in SSMS, or at least debug the code in SSMS – whether this is using the Sql debugger or modifying procs to output additional data (debug

(Dallas Snider) In the emerging “Internet of Things”, there are multitudes of devices collecting data at differing sampling rates. Integrating this data so the data has a common granularity in time is important to not only allow for accurate analysis and mining, but it will also aid in reducing the

(Pinal Dave) Most of the blog post as I say is revisiting something I wrote a while back in this blog. Recently one my blog readers asked me about user defined counters and he seems to have bumped into the blog: How to use Procedure sp_user_counter1 to sp_user_counter10 and was thinking if there is

(Scott Murray) Why do I need to create attribute relationships in my SQL Server Analysis Services Cubes and how do I create them? What are some common data sets to create attribute relationships on in SSAS? How do you create attribute relationships in SQL Server Analysis Services?