By Riley Major, 2018-09-14
So you’ve wisely decided to put your business logic in your database, but for whatever reason you can’t use inline user defined functions, even though they encapsulate logic without hurting performance. That’s ok, because you can build functions on the fly in a single statement. Continue reading
By Riley Major, 2018-08-08 | Tic-Tac-Toe Series Part 1 / Part 2 (this article)
If a pile of matchboxes can learn to play Tic-Tac-Toe, then certainly I should be able to code a solution. With my predilection for databases, T-SQL was my tool of choice. But first, I needed to model the game with some sort of data structure. Unfortunately, as I learned, it’s not as simple as mapping some X and O values to a grid.
You might have heard that SQL Server user-defined functions are the devil. That’s because someone got burned. They put a scalar function in a WHERE clause on a big table and fed it a column name. And bad things happened. Continue reading
By Riley Major, 2018-05-18 | Tic-Tac-Toe Series Part 1 (this article) / Part 2
Known as Noughts and Crosses across the pond, Tic-Tac-Toe is considered a “solved game“– meaning we can predict the outcome of the game assuming perfect play. In fact, Wikipedia says “it is straightforward to write a computer program to play tic-tac-toe perfectly“. Well then as a programmer, I ought to be able to do it.
For the 99th T-SQL Tuesday (that’s over 8 years of blog parties), Aaron Bertrand invites us to write about our #sqlibirum (credit to Drew Furgiuele and Melissa for the term)– our passions outside of SQL Server and technical community.
These days, aside from my family and technology, I’m putting most of my energy into learning more about the privileges I enjoy in society and how to dismantle the systems which provide them. Twitter has exposed me to ideas and realities which I’ve never had to face in the past, and it’s frustrating to learn about how stacked the deck is against so many people. That said, except as those issues intersect with technical communities, I’m not ready for this blog to become overtly political. So I’m going to take Aaron’s escape pod and talk about a T-SQL bad habit.
Continue reading
Matt Gordon hosts this month’s T-SQL Tuesday and asks us to write about how we’ve used a new capability of the SQL Server ecosystem to solve an old problem. At first blush, this seems like a good way to show concrete benefits to abstract new concepts. But I wonder if it sets the bar too high. Continue reading
I have to admit, I’ve been pleased with the developments with SQL Server 2016. In addition to all of the new features, they brought SQL Server to Linux and with SP1 they opened all the goodies up to Standard Edition. So when Brent Ozar asked us to scour Microsoft Connect for even more improvements for T-SQL Tuesday #86 (#tsql2sday), I wondered if we wouldn’t tempt fate. But as IT folks we love to complain about our tools, so here goes. Continue reading