This month's T-SQL Tuesday is being hosted by Steve Jones, who has asked for blog posts today on experiences we have had with triggers, good or bad. I am not a fan of triggers. While they represent a very simplistic construct of "if something happens, do something else", I've yet to encounter a situation …

Months are funny. Unlike other parts of a date, they vary in length: The last second of a minute is always 59. The last minute of a hour is always 59. The last hour of a day is always 23. But the last day of a month? Well that depends on what month it is. And the year matters too because a leap year means February gets …

I've loved using Redgate's tools ever since I discovered what they were, and now that I'm a Friend of Redgate it's even more fun because I get to give feedback to their developers and hear all about what's coming out in new releases! Recently, Redgate announced SQL Prompt 7.2, with a bunch of new features and …

I'm already at peace with the fact that I'll never know all of SQL Server's secrets, but that doesn't stop me from being surprised every time I figure out something new. In this case, it's another "secret" hiding in plain sight (Books Online). It turns out that the DROP DATABASE statement doesn't just have to …

This month's T-SQL Tuesday is hosted by Allen White (blog | @SQLRunr) and is an invitation to show off a nifty T-SQL trick you use to make your job easier. Here's one of my favorites as of late: Some of the source systems we copy from shard their data across multiple similar tables. For example, instead of having 1 …

Have you ever had one of those times where you spent hours trying different ways to make something work the way you envisioned, only to find that the solution was staring you in the face all along? I have those more often than I'd like to admit – and while the title of this post seems like a DBA 101 topic, the answer …

This month's T-SQL Tuesday topic comes to us courtesy of Stuart Ainsworth (blog | @codegumbo), and is early due to the PASS Summit being next week. Perhaps those planning next year's summit will do a better job to make sure they don't interfere with any blogging parties :) Stuart's topic for the month is joins, and …

This month's T-SQL Tuesday is the brainchild of Matt Velic and was inspired by a quote from Adam Machanic on the importance of understanding the APPLY operator. It's a good trick to have up your sleeve as it can do some nifty things and really save you some keystrokes when used properly. My first experience with APPLY …