Personally, I think the biggest reason to be excited about SQL Server on Linux is because it makes it viable for much of the Open Source world to start supporting...

I suspect that all of this comes out of a desire to make varchar and char equality testing easy. In the case of char equality testing, it seems obvious...

The whole point of that "CarrierTrackingNumber = ISNULL(@Carrier, CarrierTrackingNumber)" predicate is to provide a way of turning off the filter by passing @Carrier a NULL. It's not to look...

In response to the various references to using DISTINCT, keep in mind that DISTINCT will only save you if the values are duplicates. Once the values diverge, DISTINCT won't...

I scanned through the articles, but I may have missed it if someone discussed the "proper" way to do upserts with MERGE. I recommend http://www.made2mentor.com/2013/05/writing-t-sql-merge-statements-the-right-way/ , and...

Another hack I came up with involves using this approach to work with SELECT INTO #Temp (if you want to avoid the maintenance overhead of maintaining the CREATE TABLE statement...

First off, I like this approach more than most of the alternatives, and the trick of using a query to interrogate the current status of FMTONLY is very clever. ...