Category: T-SQL

Itzik Ben-Gan shares with us a special case of the islands problem:

In your database you keep track of services your company supports in a table called CompanyServices, and each service normally reports about once a minute that it’s online in a table called EventLog. The following code creates these tables and populates them with small sets of sample data:

[…]

The special islands task is to identify the availability periods (serviced, starttime, endtime). One catch is that there’s no assurance that a service will report that it’s online exactly every minute; you’re supposed to tolerate an interval of up to, say, 66 seconds from the previous log entry and still consider it part of the same availability period (island). Beyond 66 seconds, the new log entry starts a new availability period. So, for the input sample data above, your solution is supposed to return the following result set (not necessarily in this order):

It’s a neat twist on an old problem.

Riley Major shows a couple techniques for including ad hoc functions in T-SQL, namely Common Table Expressions and the APPLY operator:

It’s helpful to think of each APPLY as a pipe operation, taking the values from the previous derived table and passing them into the next to be manipulated. Programming T-SQL in this manner (loosely) approximates modern functional programming techniques.

It keeps each step of the logic smaller, so that it’s easier to understand. And you can expose the intermediary columns to help with debugging.

This is one of my favorite uses of the APPLY operator, as it lets you think through a problem step-by-step while still allowing the optimizer to create a set-based solution for you.

Kenneth Fisher shows how to include table-valued parameters in a dynamic SQL query:

Recently I did a presentation on dynamic SQL. In the presentation I pointed out the similarity of using sp_executesql to creating a stored procedure to do the same task. After the session I was asked: If that’s the case, can I pass a TVP (table valued parameter) into sp_executesql?

Awesome question! Let’s give it a shot.

Read on to see how to do this.

Daniel Janik head-fakes us a few times when looking at scalar user-defined function performance:

I’ve read a lot of things lately pointing to scalar functions as if they were the devil. In this blog I’m going to explore if that’s the case. Let’s have a look.

It’s true that in many situations a scalar function is often a performance bottleneck; but, is there a situation where they could be responsibly used?

What if you had a lookup table that almost never changed? Is it worth doing a join on the lookup to get the data you need?

Let’s examine a simple join between a customer address and a state lookup table.

Things are not always as they seem.

Ben Jarvis shows us how to use NUnit to perform integration testing with SQL Server stored procedures:

I wanted a way to automate the integration testing of my repositories and stored procedures so I developed the solution described below using NUnit as the test framework and SQL Server LocalDB as the database to run my tests against.

I had the following requirements for my solution which NUnit has been able to satisfy:

• Quick – tests should run quickly and not require massive amounts of set up / tear down

• Independent – all tests should be independent from one another and responsible for their own set up / tear down

• Simple – the test code should be simple to understand and easy to work with when writing new tests.

• Work Everywhere – the tests should be able to work anywhere and not require huge dependencies like a full SQL Server instance, they should be able to work with SQL LocalDB

Read on for the solution.

Shaun J Stuart walks us through a couple of solutions for finding gaps in identity ranges:

Have you ever had random inserts into a large table fail? Most of the time, inserts happen fine, but every so often you get a failure with a “primary key violation” error? If your primary key is an integer column with the identity property, you may be wondering how this is possible.

What is likely happening is your table has grown very large or has been in use for a long time and your identity column ran out of numbers. An integer column has a maximum value of 2,147,483,647. Now an integer can start at -2,147,483,648, but most people  start at 0 or 1, so that leaves you with 2 billion numbers.

This is a specific sub-case of the more general gaps and islands problem.