Category: SQL

If you write T-SQL scripts for SQL Server or Azure SQL databases, you will likely come across the requirement to ‘clone’ existing data at some point along the way. It’s usually quite straightforward to accomplish a clone operation when copying data from a single table to another table, but how about when you need to…

If you’ve ever worked with SQL Server and found the need to concatenate data from table rows into a string value, you may remember having to resort to using features like FOR XML PATH in combination with STUFF to achieve the desired result. While these approaches are functional, they tend to result in code that…

When executing long-running SQL commands, it is often important to get feedback on the operations being performed. In the context of SQL Server, the PRINT statement offers the ability to output basic informational messages that can help monitor progress and debugging. While the PRINT statement provides a simple means of outputting a message, it can…

The MERGE statement in SQL provides a streamlined way to insert, update, and delete data as part of a single batch statement. With the potential benefits of cleaner code and performance improvements for certain scenarios, the MERGE statement is a great tool to have up your sleeve. In this article, I will demonstrate how the…

Monitoring query performance is an essential aspect of proper database management. Poorly performing queries can produce a domino effect, affecting the overall health of your database server and severely degrading application user experience. Queries that result in many reads and writes to the hard disk and that use excessive amounts of CPU time and memory…