Back in 2014 I wrote a blog post on how to calculate a median value using the NTILE window function. It’s far from the best performing solution there is, but it worked on SQL Server 2008, before the introduction of OFFSET-FETCH i SQL Server. In this post, I’m going to look at creating a generalized function that calculates the median (or any percentile) of a series of values.
Tag: function
Calculating the date of easter sunday
We’ve previously looked at how to calculate recurring public holidays. However, calculating the date of easter sunday is not as simple as you might think, because it involves calculations of lunar phases. This short post contains a T-SQL translation of the popularly used Meeus-Jones-Butcher formula.
Schemabinding and table spools
There are obvious advantages as well as challenges to schemabinding things, and whether you do or don’t is often a matter of preference. However, in some cases, you need schemabinding; when you’re designing indexed views, and to optimize user-defined functions. Here’s why:
Introduction to partitioning
Partitioning is not only a great way to improve performance in large tables, but you can also use it to manage the physical storage of different chunks of data without keeping it in different tables.
SARGable expressions and performance
Understanding the concept of SARGable expressions can dramatically help you speed up query performance. Here’s how:
Analyzing partition usage and skewing
I sometimes want to know how my data is spread across different partitions in a table or index – after all, this can affect performance and storage a great deal, and if the data is really badly skewed, most or all of it could be stuck in a single partition, rendering the partitioning scheme pretty much useless in the first place.
You can use dynamic management views to find out how your data is spread across different partitions, and how those partitions are delimited, in “plain english”. Here’s how!
A function to parse ranges
Here’s a quick function to parse a list of ranges (in a varchar variable) into a table of ranges. Might come in practical, for instance when parsing user arguments for a report.
Converting JSON data to XML using a T-SQL function
Depending on your line of work, you may some time stumble over JSON data. JSON is a data format specifically designed to work well with Javascripts on web pages, so it’s fairly common in web service applications. If you’ve managed to land JSON data on your server and need to convert it to XML, here’s an idea how to.
Table value functions vs Inline functions
You may not know that there are two different ways of writing user-defined functions that return a recordset: Table value functions and Inline functions, and they both come with a number of benefits and limitations with regard to performance and programmability.