The 2015 Swedish SQL Server usergroup challenge

It’s been absolutely ages since I last wrote a blog post, mostly because I’ve been busy getting my shiny new own consultancy up to speed, but I’ll admit that writer’s block has also been a factor.

But here’s something to write home about. This year’s annual Swedish SQL Server usergroup challenge was as interesting as ever, and it marks my third stab at this prestigious competition. In this post, I’ll go through my contribution, highlighting some of the techniques that I’ve applied to make it go really fast.

Distributing values with overlapping ranges

Today, we’re going to look at how to distribute values with what I call “overlapping ranges”. What I mean by that is that the value that you need to distribute has a given range and the objects you want to distribute the values to are also defined as ranges. Sound complicated? It doesn’t have to.