New Stars of Data – SQL Bad Practices caught in the Wild

At the 12th of May 2023, a new edition of New Stars of Data takes place. If you’re not familiar with the concept, it’s a free virtual event focusing on the Microsoft Data Platform, organized by the fine folks of DataGrillen. The twist is that only new speakers are allowed; people who have never spoken at an event, or conference. Each new speaker gets a mentor assigned, and this year I had the absolute pleasure of mentoring new speaker Peter Kruis.

Peter has a “back to the core of T-SQL” session. He explains common pitfalls and how you can avoid them. I’ve seen his session a couple of times now, and I can recommend it to anyone who is either new to writing SQL in SQL Server (or any related product such as Azure SQL DB) or has a couple of years experience. His abstract:

Who are you?

You are a SQL developer, but when you handover your code to your senior, you sometimes might hear: “Don’t do this anymore, it’s a bad practice!”. If you want to learn more about those bad practices which I see are being used a lot, this session is for you!

How is this session going to help you?!

In this session you will learn about some of those “code smells”. I will show you an example of the bad practice, explain why it should be avoided and give a possible solution for them. We are going to talk about: Functions in the WHERE clause, Implicit casting, SELECT * and some others. This knowledge will help you make your queries run faster, need less resources and therefore will make your DBA and users happy.

There are also many other great sessions to watch, so be sure to check out the schedule!