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!
A cross-UPDATE is an UPDATE operation that includes one or more other tables, using a JOIN. This is very useful in order to update one table with a value derived from another table.
A fast way to create a duplicate of an SQL Server Agent job is to script it, then modify and run the script. But there’s a pitfall.
Here’s an interesting feature I found in the code of a colleague the other day. A common task in T-SQL is eliminating duplicate records. This became a lot easier with the introduction of windowed functions way back in SQL Server 2005, such as ROW_NUMBER(), but it turns out, I’ve still been missing out on a really simple and cool solution.