Category: Syntax

Simon Frazer rolls back:

If you’ve been working with T-SQL scripts for a while, you’ve likely encountered variables. These are essential for writing scripts that go beyond basic SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE, or DELETE statements.

Variables can serve multiple purposes: they can act as parameters passed into stored procedures, hold the results of one query to use in another, or even help debug scripts during testing (you do test your scripts before running them on real data, right?).

One particularly interesting aspect of variables is how they behave in transactions, often in ways we might not expect.

Read on for the demo. This also applies to table variables, which is why they can be extremely important for diagnosing issues before performing a rollback. You can write error results to the table variable first, then access them post-rollback.

Joe Fleming is not a fan of cursors:

So what are cursors, and why are they so bad?  A cursor is a construct in SQL Server that lets you define a query which produces a multi-row dataset and allows you to step through it one row at a time. You declare a cursor in this way:

DECLARE Performance_killer1 CURSOR FOR SELECT OrderNumber, OrderLineNumber, ItemID, ItemDescription, Quantity, Price FROM Orders

You must then OPEN the cursor and FETCH the next value from it into a set of variables, then perform your calculations and updates, repeating until you’ve reached the end of your dataset. From the standpoint of someone unfamiliar with database processing, this method is fairly intuitive. You do one thing at a time. From the database professional’s perspective, it’s very painful to see. There are a few reasons why.

I generally agree with this, though there are specific queries that you cannot write in a set-based context, particularly administrative queries that have to run over each table or database in an instance. I also found that I was unable to write a proper leaky bucket algorithm implementation in T-SQL without using a cursor. But the other 99.x% of the time? No cursors needed.

Also, if you do need a cursor, use a cursor instead of a WHILE loop. It’s more to remember but you can performance tune cursors, whereas WHILE loops are about as dog-slow as they get and never get better.

Erik Darling has a new video. Erik mentions the best use case of this being for archival tables, but I’ll add one more: if you’re using a queue table (ignoring how good or bad of an idea this is), you have multiple processes operating on this queue table, and you want to reduce the likelihood of two processes picking up the same value, you can perform the equivalent of popping off of a queue: delete the first element(s) from the queue table and output it into a temp table. From there, you can operate on that data at your leisure, and the next process will grab some other batch of data. And if everything goes mildly wrong, re-insert that data back into the queue and let some other sucker try it. I’ve used this a few times for data warehousing processes and it works out pretty well.

The only thing I’m unsure about is how he figured out that I’m CommonTableExpressionLover11357.

Erik Darling has a pair of videos covering 3 1/2 set operations. First up is UNION and UNION ALL. These are the set operations that most people know about and use fairly regularly, and Erik explains the difference between the two, including the performance difference between the two.

Then, Erik hits upon the two lesser-known set operations: INTERSECT and EXCEPT. These are extremely useful in certain circumstances, and tend to perform much better than other alternatives. For example, to figure out if two datasets are exactly the same, it’s really hard to go wrong with the following pair of queries:

SELECT a.* FROM a EXCEPT SELECT b.* FROM b;
SELECT b.* FROM b EXCEPT SELECT a.* FROM a;

You need both queries because the former tells you if there are any records in A that do not exist in B, either because the record simply is not there or because there is a difference in one or more values in B’s matching record. But then, you also have to check the opposite side, because there might be a record in B that does not exist in A and the first query will not expose it.

This is typically the way I’d write test cases, ensuring that both queries return 0 results. Granted, you could always just check that the count of the intersection equals the count of records:

DECLARE @c1 INT, @c2 INT;
SELECT @c1 = SELECT COUNT(*) FROM (SELECT a.* FROM a INTERSECT SELECT b.* FROM b);
SELECT @c2 = SELECT COUNT(*) FROM a;

In this case, @c1 and @c2 should be the same number.

Chad Callihan engages the limit breaker:

I’m familiar with using the OVER clause and don’t think it’s too uncommon to see it used for including row numbers by using ROW_NUMBER() and aggregating data. But even though they’ve been around since SQL Server 2012, I’m not too familiar with using the OVER clause with the UNBOUNDED PRECEDING and UNBOUNDED FOLLOWING to affect the window being queried.

Let’s take a look at a couple of examples using UNBOUNDED PRECEDING and UNBOUNDED FOLLOWING.

Click through for those examples. The default ranges for window functions usually make a lot of sense, but it’s good to understand your options for frames: ROWS vs RANGE, as well as the frame values (UNBOUNDED PRECEDING, {N} PRECEDING, CURRENT ROW, {N} FOLLOWING, and UNBOUNDED FOLLOWING).

Erik Darling knows how to get my interest.

No text for me to copy, but Erik goes into detail on good use cases of the APPLY operator. Erik hits on several of the use cases that I like to use APPLY for and does a good job demonstrating its value.

Magda Bronowska takes a look at some functionality currently available only in Azure SQL Database and Managed Instance:

Microsoft releases the classic SQL Server every couple of years, with some functionality added through regular updates. On the other hand, the SQL Server offering in Azure (Azure SQL Database and Managed Instance) receives the latest features earlier.

This post highlights some of the T-SQL functions currently available in Azure SQL but not yet in classic SQL Server. However, with the recent announcement of SQL Server 2025, this might change next year. Keep in mind that some of these functions are in preview, so their behavior might evolve as they reach general availability.

Click through for those examples.