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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 ...

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 ...

Ok I admit - I use it. Pretty much everyone I know uses it and yet I feel dirty when I do.  Why? Well it's not portable SQL and most certainly not ANSI standard.  I need to get the datetime I hear you say.  How do I do this without getdate()?  There is a perfectly good substitute in the form of CURRENT_TIMESTAMP that is ...

A colleague of mine asked for a simple example to get him up and running with the basics of bitmasking.  Since I had gone to the effort to create the example I thought I might as well blog it :o). This example uses the logical AND operator &. First of all you need to define your table.. create table BitmaskDemo (ID int Primary ...

  This issue caught me out today whilst putting together some build scripts for reference data. So I thought I’d share it. USE [tempdb] GO CREATE TABLE [dbo].[Table_1](       [Col1] [int] IDENTITY(1,1) NOT NULL,       [Col2] [char](1) NOT NULL ) ON [PRIMARY] GO delete from ...