If space were an issue there's always row\page compression which would give you variable length storage on integers under the covers:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/relational-databases/data-compression/row-compression-implementation

We tend to avoid...

This feels a little risky to me as it depends on that shift cycle never changing or slipping out of sequence. Were I running this I'd be more comfortable using...

John Mitchell-245523 (3/8/2016)

---

Gabriel P (3/8/2016)

---

If you know referential integrity is being enforced, why query the Departments table at all if you're not returning any data from it? If you are...

I agree completely Joe. However I find myself using this technique a lot in order...

While I wouldn't trust the results without checking them by eye (or expect all cases to be found) DIFFERENCE can be used as a quick and dirty way of identifying...

Similarly to Albert the main use I've come across for binary data types is check sums generated by the hashbytes function.

It might be worth picking up a copy of 'The Microsoft Data Warehouse Toolkit' from the Kimball group. It will give you a good start on the theory side of...

Great article, thanks.

It appears there's a small error though, Table 1 is missing for me.

Thanks for this, it's a good clear summary of these features.

Are there any performance gains to be had by switching to use these features over unioning a set of SQL...

This may not be what you're looking for but as a last resort you could create a link with the rs:format option to produce a pre rendered report as a...

A very interesting article, I'm looking forward to the follow ups as we're heading in to a fairly big matching job (merging 1/4 million education records to 100k social care...

Interesting project,.

I know the person who runs the food bank\homless charity in a town near to me and this could turn out to be useful when up and running....

I assume the old exams will be withdrawn at some point. When is this likely to happen? We had vouchers for the exam bundled in with a recent training course...

Thanks, I'm due to take the first exam some time soon and this has been very helpful, especially flagging up some of the areas I'll need to cover that I...

In that case getting IIS running on your machine and then making use of something like the latest Adobe Dreamweaver trial to build some web pages could be the quickest...