One of my clients recently had a problem where a query with a semi-measly execution cost of .3 was taking 25 seconds to return. Worse, forcing the query to use a suitable index (instead of the PK with accompanying bookmarks) had a cost of 4.8 and returned instantly. Moreover, the query taking 25 seconds was only iterating over a ...

ORDER BY has never been technically 'allowed' in a view definition. For example, the following code:CREATE VIEW dbo.[UsersByFirstName] AS SELECT * FROM dbo.[users] ORDER BY [FirstName] GO will throw an error if you attempt to run it. Books Online for SQL Server 2000 says: The ORDER BY clause is invalid in views, inline ...

One thing I forgot to cover in my previous 'cheet sheet' post of MSDE functionality was any mention of the price. I bring that up because it bit me in the hiney today. On aspadvice I said that MSDE wasn't free, only free-distributable by owners of certain products (like Visual Studio, etc.) BOY was I wrong. Only, no I wasn't. Which just ...

I'm about to do a couple of posts comparing MSDE against SQL Server Express (or, as I like to call it, SQLE). In these posts I'll cover the facts about MSDE -- in an easy to digest form (I have such a hard time keeping the details straight myself -- I'm sure that others do as well -- so having a simple list of what MSDE does and doesn't do ...

This one caused me a brief head-scratch the other day. A coworker came and told me he had a corrupted table. Initially that seemed plausible.. it was a huge table/database with a fair amount of activity. But when I was told that the reason for THINKING the table was corrupt was due to the fact that data from one column was spilling into the next, ...

I'm still looking into this one myself. But at this point I'm thinking I may have stumbled on to a bug. Someone explain what's up with the following: -- returns 0123456789 SELECT ISNULL(NULL,'0123456789') -- returns NULL SELECT NULLIF('0123456789','0123456789') -- works, because 01234 is shorter than 0123456789 SELECT ...