Gregory Larsen

In my last article I discussed the GROUP BY clause.  This article will expand on the GROUP BY topic by discussing the ROLLUP, CUBE and GROUPING SETS operators.  These operators are used with the GROUP BY clause and allow you to create subtotals, grand totals and superset of subtotals.  Read on to find out more […]

There are times when you want to have SQL Server return an aggregated result set, instead of a detailed result set. SQL Server has the GROUP BY clause that provides you a way to aggregate your SQL Server data. The GROUP BY clause allows you to group data on a single column, multiple columns, or […]

Having your data returned to you in some meaningful sorted order is important sometimes.  If you don’t tell SQL Server you want to order the results of a SELECT statement then there is no guarantee that your result set will come back in a particular order.  To make sure a result set is ordered you […]

The term UPSERT has been coined to refer to an operation that inserts rows into a table if they don’t exist, otherwise they are updated.   To perform the UPSERT operation Microsoft introduced the MERGE statement.  The MERGE statement was included into the set of TSQL statements when SQL Server 2008 was introduced.  Not only does […]

In my last two articles I discuss using the INSERT and UPDATE statement. These two commands added new rows and modified existing rows. In this article I will explore how to remove rows from a table using the DELETE statement. Syntax of the DELETE Statement You may want to delete rows because they are no […]

If you are an application programmer then you will more than likely need to write TSQL code to update your SQL Server database tables.  In order to update a row in a SQL Server table you will use the UDPATE statement.  In this article I will show you a number of different ways to use […]

Before you can read data from your database you need to understand how to insert data into the tables in your database.  There are a number of different ways to accomplish this.  In this article I will be explore the methods you can use when inserting data into a database table using the INSERT statement. […]

If you are a DBA you probably are responsible for running and monitoring all the SQL Server Agent jobs on one or more SQL Server instances.  How do you monitor these SQL Agent jobs?   There is always the manual method of monitoring the history of all the SQL Server agent jobs.  In this article I […]

Over the years I’ve been asked a number of times what does it take to become a DBA, or what kinds of traits should I be looking for when hiring a DBA.  Those traits can be summarized it two categories: Technical and Personal.  In my last article I discussed the technical traits of a DBA.  […]

I’m going to deviate from my normal how-to topic related to SQL Server, and focus more on a touchy feely topic.  In this article and my next article I’ll be exploring the traits of a DBA.  Over the years I’ve been asked a number of times what does it take to become a DBA, or […]

With the on-boarding of the resource governor in SQL Server with SQL Server 2008 we were able to start throttling applications and DBA processes that consumed large amounts of CPU and Memory.  This was a great improvement that allowed DBAs to better manage machine resources.  With the introduction of SQL Server 2014 the Microsoft team […]

By now you have probably heard that when Microsoft rolls out project Hekaton with SQL Server 2014 they will be calling it In-Memory OLTP.  This new feature allows you to place SQL Server tables in memory.  As you start considering moving disk based tables to memory based tables it will be important to understand how […]