Category: T-SQL

Gail Shaw explains the concept of deferred compilation:

When I talked about row estimations for table variables, I mentioned ‘deferred compile’, but didn’t give a whole lot of details. What, then, is a deferred compilation? Let’s start with how batches work normally.

T-SQL is an interpreted language. While we talk about compiles, they’re not compilations in the sense of what happens to C++. There’s no conversion of the script to a machine language or intermediate language which is used from that point onwards. Every time a batch executes, it has to be parsed, bound and have an execution plan generated or fetched from cache.

Click through to learn what it does mean.

Andy Levy has a new reason for us:

I got a merge a while back that included a change I wasn’t expecting from one of my developers. All they were doing was renaming a column on a table. We had names settled a while ago. What’s up with that?

Turns out, when I created the table, I named one of the fields BrithYear. This merge request corrected it to BirthYear. The misspelling slipped past me, past everyone else, it was only discovered because when this developer was building the a new query into their code, they spelled the field as one would expect, and the query threw an error.

There’s many a reason not to use SELECT * in application code; this is one I don’t think I’d heard before.

Itzik Ben-Gan has part one of solutions to a challenge:

Last month I posted a challenge to create an efficient number series generator. The responses were overwhelming. There were many brilliant ideas and suggestions, with lots of applications well beyond this particular challenge. It made me realize how great it is to be part of a community, and that amazing things can be achieved when a group of smart people joins forces. Thanks Alan Burstein, Joe Obbish, Adam Machanic, Christopher Ford, Jeff Moden, Charlie, NoamGr, Kamil Kosno, Dave Mason and John Number2 for sharing your ideas and comments.

Initially I thought of writing just one article to summarize the ideas people submitted, but there were too many. So I’ll split the coverage to several articles. This month I’ll focus primarily on Charlie’s and Alan Burstein’s suggested improvements to the two original solutions that I posted last month in the form of the inline TVFs called dbo.GetNumsItzikBatch and dbo.GetNumsItzik. I’ll name the improved versions dbo.GetNumsAlanCharlieItzikBatch and dbo.GetNumsAlanCharlieItzik, respectively.

One of the best parts about this happening in public is that there is a real benefit to having multiple people look over a problem, and then waves of people refining those solutions over time.

Erik Darling shows off a pattern:

Well, friends, I have good news for you. This is an easy one to implement.

Let’s say that in Stack Overflow land, when a user deletes their account we also delete all their votes. That’s not how it works, but it’s how I’m going to show you how to condense what can normally be a difficult process to isolate into a single operation.

The one gripe I have with this post is that my annoyingly loud keyboard is buckling spring, not Cherry MX Blue, thank-you-very-much.