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Category: T-SQL Tuesday

Solving Groups of Groups Problems with Window Functions

Published 2020-02-12 by Kevin Feasel

James McGillivray shows off some of the power of window functions:

Windowing functions are an underused feature in SQL Server, with myriad uses. The most common problems we solve are running totals, seeing group totals on the same line as individual lines from the group (allowing calculations like subtotal %). I don’t know if there are better solutions, but before Windowing Functions, I used to solve these kind of problems with self joins, or nested queries. The performance of Windowing Functions is significantly better than this approach, and that alone has made my life considerably better.

The more I learn about Windowing Functions, the more often I see use cases where they are useful.

I love talking about, and teaching people to use, Windowing functions to make their lives better, so I’m quite excited to be able to use them as the topic for today’s post.

Specifically, James looks at groups of groups problems and aggregates of aggregates problems.

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T-SQL Tuesday Roundup

Published 2019-12-16 by Kevin Feasel

Mala Mahadevan rounds up T-SQL Tuesday #121:

7 people out of 18 people talk of their new dream jobs. This should give all of us hope that there are good gigs out there, if we are stuck in a bad place. No gig is perfect, of course, but it helps to have a dream and a direction to get to a better place. Almost everyone mentions their involvement with community/#sqlfamily as a huge reward. If you are reading this and not an active part of community yet – please consider doing so. It helps to be among supportive, uplifting people who care for you and have similar goals as you do.

To conclude – I really liked these lines from Shane O Neill’s post – ‘ I believe the best gift is the gifts that you can give back. So, here’s hoping that the next year sees us all help more than hinder, learn more than laze, and teach more than troll.’

Click through for posts from the 18 respondents.

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T-SQL Tuesday 120 Round-Up

Published 2019-11-21 by Kevin Feasel

Wayne Sheffield summarizes T-SQL Tuesday #120:

The end of the first 10 years of T-SQL Tuesday blogging occurred this month, with me hosting T-SQL Tuesday #120. The theme this month was to talk about something you’ve seen that made you think “What were you thinking?” (you can read the invitation here). We had several bloggers jump in and post their thoughts. So let’s just jump into a quick recap of who posted what (for each blogger, I also include a link to their Twitter account, their main blog, and the link to their T-SQL Tuesday #120 post).

Click through for the recap.

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T-SQL Tuesday 118 Roundup

Published 2019-09-16 by Kevin Feasel

Kevin Chant played Santa Claus this month:

I hope they had as much fun contributing their posts as I had reading them afterwards. For those who missed the invitation you can read about it here.

For some reason I thought it’d be a good idea to do it on my birthday month when I first given choices about which month to host. However, now I cannot remember why.

Read on for 23 separate blog posts covering quite a few peoples’ desires for new features, bugfixes, or changes in functionality.

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T-SQL Tuesday 117 Roundup

Published 2019-08-21 by Kevin Feasel

Steve Jones has the roundup for this month’s T-SQL Tuesday:

The summary from my fourth T-SQL Tuesday hosting for #117. This time I was scrambling a bit, but since I’ve worked with a few customers in the last year that use MOT tables, I thought this might be a good topic.

Either everyone is on vacation or not many people think about them. Or maybe they aren’t interesting. In any case, here’s the roundup.

I’d like to say it’s because everyone’s on vacation, but I think In-Memory OLTP is an underutilized technology. Granted, there are reasons why it’s not used as much as it should be—early versions were too limiting and could have weird consequences on your servers—but if you’re on SQL Server 2017, it’s worth another look.

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Memory-Optimized Table Types

Published 2019-08-13 by Kevin Feasel

Rob Farley hates spelling “optimized” the best way:

Let me start by saying that if you really want to get the most out of this feature, you will dive deep into questions like durability and natively-compiled stored procedures, which can really make your database fly if the conditions are right. Arguably, any process you’re doing (such as ETL) where the data doesn’t have to survive a system restart should be considered for Memory-Optimized Tables with durability set to SCHEMA_ONLY (I say ‘considered’ because the answer isn’t always obvious – at the moment inserting into memory-optimised tables won’t run in parallel, and this could be a show-stopper for you).

But today I’m going to mention one of the quick-wins available: Table Variables that use User-defined Table Types

This can absolutely help you out, especially in versions of SQL Server prior to 2019 where temporary object metadata contention is a real issue on busy servers.

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T-SQL Tuesday 116 Roundup

Published 2019-07-18 by Kevin Feasel

Tracy Boggiano hosted this month’s T-SQL Tuesday, on the topic of SQL Server on Linux:

I noticed a common theme in how easy it is to install SQL on Linux that tells me if you didn’t think you had time to install SQL on Linux then you probably do and should give a try in the near future.

Thanks for all that participated!

Let me put it this way: one of my employees, who had never really worked with SQL Server before, got SQL Server on Linux installed through Docker in about 15 minutes. It’s really easy to do.

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T-SQL Tuesday 115 Roundup

Published 2019-06-13 by Kevin Feasel

Mohammad Darab has a roundup for this month’s T-SQL Tuesday:

It was an absolute honor to host this month’s TSQL Tuesday. I decided on doing the “Dear 20 year old self” as a way for us to reflect on life. It seemed like this topic hit home with a lot of people. I enjoyed reading each one of the posts.

If you don’t find your post in this Round Up, please email me your link and I will update this post!

There were 14 responses this month; click through for the full set.

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T-SQL Tuesday 114 Roundup

Published 2019-05-30 by Kevin Feasel

Matthew McGiffen wraps up another T-SQL Tuesday:

Here’s my round-up for this month’s T-SQL Tuesday.

Thanks to everyone who contributed last week. It was great reading your posts and seeing the different ways you interpreted the puzzle theme.

We had real-life problems, we had SQL coding questions, we had puzzles, we had solutions, we had games, and we had the imaginarium.

Click through for thirteen blog posts.

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