Scalar functions can be a real headache when you’re performance tuning. For one, they don’t parallelize. In fact, if you use a scalar function in a computed column, it will prevent any query that uses that table from going parallel – even if you don’t reference that column at all!
By difficulty
Encrypting SQL Server connections with Let’s Encrypt certificates
Encrypting your SQL Server’s TDS connections should be high on your list of things to do if you’re concerned with the privacy of your data. This often boils down to one big problem: can you get a valid certificate without paying a ton of money, and will it work with SQL Server?
So follow me down the rabbit hole, as we work out the steps to using Let’s Encrypt to create (and auto-renew!) a certificate for SQL Server. This is going to get technical.
Legacy apps that don’t believe in schemas
Inspired by an actual customer scenario: what if you have a legacy app that doesn’t schema-prefix its database objects, but you want it to work with a specific assigned schema? There’s a quick and easy solution.
Effective permissions on SQL Server
SQL Server Management Studio allows you to view effective permissions on an object, but it’s limited in a few important respects. To work around some of those limitations, I’ve built a stored procedure to display all the defined and effective permissions across an entire SQL Server database.
Fun with random names
Just for laughs, we’re going to take a look at a slightly-too-complex yet elegant solution to a seemingly simple task: creating a list of 100 fictional company names for a demo database.
How good are best practices?
You’ll find a lot of people, consultants and peers, liberally dispensing plenty of “best practices” on the Interwebs and in real life. Heck, I’d say that’s pretty much all I do on this blog. But when should you go with the best practice and when should you make your own road?
Prioritizing rows in a union
I just remembered a pretty common data challenge the other day. Suppose you have a number of tables, all with similar information in them. You want to union their contents, but you need to prioritize them, so you want to choose all the rows from table A, then rows from table B that are not included in A, then rows from C that are not included in A or B, and so on.
This is a pretty common use case in data cleansing or data warehousing applications. There are a few different ways to go about this, some more obvious than others.
Automatically guessing foreign key constraints
With good naming and datatyping conventions, an automated script can help you with the process of creating foreign key constraints across your database, or actually, suggest table relations where you’ve forgotten to implement them.
Finding primary key candidates
Probably one of the most common challenges I see when I do ETL and business intelligence work is analyzing a table (or a file) for possible primary keys. And while a bit of domain knowledge, along with a quick eye and some experience will get you really far, sometimes you may need some computational help just to be sure.
Here are some handy tricks to get you started!
Speaking at the Group By conference!
This past Friday, I had the great privilege of speaking at the on-line Group By conference. Group By is a community-driven conference where anyone can submit an abstract. Site visitors will then rate sessions as well as help you build and improve your abstract.
My presentation was about various tips and tricks in SQL Server Management Studio, some of which I’ve already covered in previous articles on this blog.
sqlsunday.com 