I’m not going to ask you to vote for the abstracts that I submitted for the PASS Summit. I’m not even going to mention the abstracts that Roger and Ashley submitted. I figure if you’re reading this, you may have already read the post I wrote about them, back before SQLPASS had said that there’d be voting. Instead, I’m going to pick a few people ...

SQL Server is quite remarkable in a bunch of ways. In this post, I’m using the way that the Query Optimizer handles LIKE to keep it SARGable, the Execution Plans that result, Collations, and PowerShell to come up with the Swedish alphabet. SARGability is the ability to seek for items in an index according to a particular set of criteria. If you ...

Roger’s been doing a great job extending PivotViewer recently, and you can find the list of LobsterPot pivots at http://pivot.lobsterpot.com.au Many months back, the TED Talk that Gary Flake did about Pivot caught my imagination, and I did some research into it. At the time, most of what we did with Pivot was geared towards what we could do for ...

This month’s T-SQL Tuesday has me caught slightly unawares. I’m in the UK, having come over for SQLBits, and I’m left writing this with only a few hours to go. The theme this time is on misconceptions in SQL, and this fits nicely with SARGability – one of the topics that I presented on at SQLBits a week and a half ago. I often see people refer ...

I just did a talk for 24 Hours of PASS on Sargability. I’ve done this talk before (about five months ago at the user group I run and at the PASS AppDev Virtual Chapter). There are a number of useful resources out there about sargability. I’ve blogged about it before, Brent Ozar has blogged about it, and so on. One thing that I don’t believe has ...

Of course, the one not to miss is the one I’m doing, on Fixing Queries with Advanced T-SQL Techniques, but actually, they’re all excellent. For example, Simon’s just blogged that Buck Woody’s seminar topic has changed. Instead of being on career development, it’s now on DBA skills for the non-DBA. This is a seminar that every .Net developer and ...

I received an email from someone who’s trying to decide whether or not to register for my precon at SQLBits 7 next month. He’s already coming to the event (which should be a given for anyone who can make it), but he was trying to work out a few things about my precon, which is called “Fixing Queries through Advanced T-SQL Techniques”. He wrote: ...

I’m giving a pre-con seminar at SQLBits 7 on September 30 this year in York (the Old one, in Yorkshire – similar to the New one, but with different songs). Let me quickly explain a few things about it – to help you persuade your boss to let you attend (and when you’ve done the persuading, go here and pick the “Full Conference” option). It’s on ...