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In my current day job I’m doing a lot of work against an Oracle back-end and I’ve just come across a situation where I need to do some string aggregation. Effectively I needed to turn this: Parent Child Charles William Charles Harry Anne Peter Anne Zara Andrew Beatrice Andrew Eugenie into ...

My colleague Jamie Thomson  posted an intriguing article on DRY SQL which you can read all about here. It raised a number of questions for me so I thought I’d post my own response to it. Here is a list of some of these questions that sprung to my mind. Did the code change come up with the same query plan? Were the tables indexed in ...

I recently inherited some SQL that someone else had written and had the job of “tidying it up” before it gets pushed out to production. Here’s a slightly simplified (yes, simplified) version of that SQL: 1: --options 2: select asset_class 3: , case when volume > 0 then 'profit' 4: ...

In SQL 2005 we could write something like this: declare @i int select @i = dbo.udf_MyScalarFunction() exec usp_MyStoredProc @i In SQL 2008 we can write the same functionality more succinctly like this: declare @i int = dbo.udf_MyScalarFunction() exec usp_MyStoredProc @i Wouldn’t it be nice if, in the future, ...

I’m glad to report that, 2 months after I launched it, SQL Server Mesh code repository is still going strong. We’re now approaching 100 members (there were 53 at last count) with more members and more content being added every day. If you are submitting content then I encourage you to blog about it, tweet about it (use hashtag #sqlmesh) and/or put ...

Simon Sabin just published a blog post Where should the ON clause go? where he explained his penchant for writing ON predicates for JOIN clauses on the same line so he can easily spot them like so: select track, level, title, Name, ss.length   from   ConferenceSession cs   join   ...

Three weeks ago I posted a blog entry entitled SQL Server code repository on Live Mesh where I announced the creation (if that’s the right word) of a folder, hosted on Live Mesh, that anyone in the SQL Server community could get access and contribute to. Since then the uptake has been pretty good; we’ve got 53 members and that number has been ...

Those who know me may be aware that as well as my obvious interest in SQL Server I also have a very keen interest in Windows Live and specifically in Live Mesh, an incubation technology from Microsoft that synchronises data between different devices and the cloud (go to Live Mesh Overview to learn more about it). Over the past couple of months I ...

[Although I colloquially refer to myself on this blog as “SSIS Junkie” it won’t have escaped the notice of regular readers that I haven’t been talking about SSIS much lately, in fact nothing of real substance in regard to SSIS has appeared here since Nesting variables to calculate values on 24th October. The reason for that is that I simply ...

Crikey.  That title sounds like an essay I had to write when I was at school and that was a long time ago... Jamie Thomson raised an important point in a comment on a blog I posted yesterday entitled "Getting rid of getdate()".  In it I stated that ISNULL() and COALESCE() are in the same boat as getdate() and ...