The 5 First SQL Errors to Check For

Is your SQL query crashing? Nine times out of ten it will be for one of these 5 reasons!

Returning 0's in a SUM (SQL Spackle)

Learn how you can sum data by hour and by day while showing 0 values in your result sets for those time periods without a sum in this short article by Patrick Cahill.

3 SQL Join Concepts to Help You Choose the Right Join

What do SQL joins and the "teach a man to fish" Chinese proverb have in common? SQL joins, like regular expressions, are one of those commonplace programming tasks in which true success is entirely dependent upon your ability to conceptualize the outcome. Fail to do so and you'll likely wind up spending a few hours in a frustrating round of trial and error. Like regular expressions, the proliferation of online examples has actually contributed to the frustration, providing the equivalent of a day's worth of fish rather than the proverbial fishing pool.

GO

TIME Gentlemen please! The SQL Server temporal datatypes

If you are still using the old Sybase DateTime datatype, it is a good idea to move your code to the more standard datatypes that were introduced in SQL Server 2008. Joe Celko explains why, and walks through some of the history of the TSQL way of storing and manipulating dates and times.

Parameterization Settings

STUFF Function

Identity Crisis: Attack of the Clone

Identity Reseed

Check your Digits

The most persistent struggle in data processing has been to ensure clean data. There are many ways that data can be incorrect and a database must check, as best it can, that the data is correct. The CHECK constraint is ideally suited for this sort of work, and the checking routine can become quite complex when dealing with check digits in data.