It’s the second Tuesday of the month, so it’s time for the T-SQL Tuesday blog party! This month’s topic is chosen by Camila Henrique (blog): what T-SQL advice would you give to your younger self? Here’s a little list I’d tell anyone starting out with T-SQL: you can configure most tools that when you hit […]
Category: TSQL
Parsing JSON in SQL Server with OPENJSON
Recently I had a piece of JSON of which I needed to extract data from to put into a table in Azure SQL DB. Unfortunately, the structure of the JSON itself was too complex to map automatically in Azure Data Factory. It might be possible though, but after a few tries to map it manually […]
Convert Local Datetime to UTC (pre-SQL Server 2016)
Recently I was working with a client who was still on SQL Server 2012. Support issues aside, there are some very useful T-SQL functions/clauses who didn’t exist in 2012, but were introduced in a later version. One of them is AT TIME ZONE, which you can use the convert dates between time zones, as demonstrated […]
T-SQL Tuesday #143 – Short code examples
It’s this time of the month again! T-SQL Tuesday is a monthly blogging party on the second Tuesday. This month’s topic is “What are your go to handy short scripts?” brought to you by John McCormack. What are those little short bits of code that you can’t live without? I’m talking about little snippets that […]
The GREATEST new T-SQL Function
If the title isn’t obvious enough, this blog post is about the new function GREATEST, and it’s sibling LEAST. But wait, how come there’s a new T-SQL function? There isn’t a new release of SQL Server! That’s right, those two new functions are released in Azure SQL DB, Azure SQL Managed Instance and Azure Synapse […]
Converting a Datetime to UTC
I was in a need of converting some datetime values (of which I know the actual timezone) to UTC dates. A quick Google search showed me that most results on the first page were simply wrong. Most of them used this trick: Seems nifty, but they forgot about daylight savings time. If I run the […]
Optimize for Unknown for Inline Table-Valued Functions
I had a curious performance issue today. An inline table-valued function (iTVF) was performing poorly for some parameter sets, and quite fast for other parameter values. In short, this one is fast: This one is slow: Turns out SQL Server used a plan with a hash join in the fast query, and a nested loop […]
SQL Server Development Best Practices – Webinar
I’m delighted to announce I’ll be giving a webinar for MSSQLTips.com about SQL Server Development Best Practices. Aka writing T-SQL and stuff 🙂 The webcast is the 13th of June 2019 at 7PM UTC. In a nutshell, I’ll be talking about the stuff I would tell my 10-year younger self about T-SQL development (if I […]
Nesting Aggregates with Window Functions
Recenty I was writing an article for MSSQLTips where I had to create a treemap (it will be published soon). As sample data, I used the different folders containing the drafts for all the tips I ever wrote. As measures, I have the number of kilobytes and the number of items per folder. An example: […]