SQL Server is one of the best products to come out of Microsoft, but not every professional knows how to use it effectively. For example, some might find it difficult to create a stored procedure but ...

A free tool to reduce coding for developers who like to surface T-SQL database recordsets in a simple collection of customized POCO objects. Every so often, I find myself wishing that I had a utility ...

A common SQL habit is to use SELECT * on a query, because it’s tedious to list all the columns you need. Plus, sometimes those columns may change over time, so why not just do things the easy way? But ...

Everyone wants faster database queries, and both SQL developers and DBAs can turn to many time-tested methods to achieve that goal. Unfortunately, no single method is foolproof or ironclad. But even ...

I recently wrote a .NET web application for work. I always make a data access class with methods for getting data, but I usually just point the methods to stored procedures. This time, I decided to ...

Dynamic SQL lets you create a query string based off of user input. SQL Server allows you to create dynamic SQL statements. The statements use a SQL string varchar data type, then you execute the ...

Microsoft has just added support for query hints to Azure SQL Database, giving database administrators a powerful tool to manage the performance of ISV application code. Here's how it works. Database ...

In part 1 of my SQL Server 2022 features series, you learned about the improvements to the cardinality estimator component of query optimization. In this installment, you will learn about another ...