Yes, that's the Colin. Congrats to all winners.

Ok, cool. I've tended to use two strange characters (ones that can't be typed easily), to avoid the chance of hitting a match. But I agree that in normal text...

Can't this be done in a much more simple way than trying to pick a single character that could never appear? By choosing two characters that can't appear next to...

Hi Paul & co,

This is one of the places where I'd consider that breaking sargability can help, as a non-sargable predicate isn't going to be used in a Seek Predicate...

Yeah - that's my line. I'm pleased it's helping people remember this important aspect of how to read execution plans.

Well, I got the pre-con! I'm surprised, so if you had any influence in that, Steve, I thank you. Now I just have to make sure I don't disappoint the...

Thanks for your kind words, Steve. It'd be nice to get a precon spot, but I know I'm up against some excellent competition.

Using COUNT(1) instead of COUNT(*) won't change the situation.

I'm guessing there's some nasty logic in those views.

But still, to find twenty rows that satisfy those conditions is going to be a lot quicker than counting how many there...

I'm going to guess that you only return the first page of data in 7ms, and that this allows a massive shortcut in processing.

You'll have to provide some more information. A query which counts records shouldn't take longer than the equivalent query that returns them all.

The best ways to speed it up would...

No prerequisites... you turn up, you take the exam, and if you know your stuff, you pass!

And, if you work with BI, passing shouldn't be a problem.

Rob

The query is fine, because you're referring to a column that's actually in the table. The warning appears because you're aliasing the column in the select clause as [timestamp], and...

Then it's a string, not an integer.

Store it as an integer, and handle how you display that later. Perhaps as a computed column?

SQLBits V (last November) had at least 16 MVPs there.

Simon, James, Martin, Chris, Tony, Allan, Darren, Jamie, Christian, Ashwani, Colin, Jasper, Satya, Brent, Andre & Rob.

Another Chris was awarded...