Counting more efficiently

Nearly a decade ago, I wrote a post called “Bad habits : Counting rows the hard way.” In that post, I talked about how we can use SQL Server’s metadata to instantly retrieve the row count for a table.

Dijkstra's Algorithm

Introduction This article celebrates a classic algorithm [1] of Dijkstra (1930 – 2002) which finds a path of minimal cost between any pair of nodes in an undirected graph. His procedure is widely recognized as a fundamental tool for examining communication and transportation networks (eg. Google Maps) and is surprisingly simple. By his own admission, […]

Default Statistics Sampling

The First Place Seeing the New Year

The FK Columns

Parameter Defaults

Statistics Sampling Options

Searching an Encrypted Column

This article examines the challenges with searches on encrypted data and presents a possible solution that you might use to speed up those queries.

Getting a List of Names

SQL GROUP BY Alias - An Oracle feature that would be great in SQL Server

Learn about using an alias in the GROUP BY clause for complex SQL Server code instead of having to rewrite the code in the GROUP BY.