Over the years I’ve written a few blog series on certain topics. Here they are in preferred reading order.
Database fundamentals
- So, like, what is a byte?
- What is a database?
- Data types and collation
- Fundamentals of data types
- A first look at normalisation
- Normalisation, the sequel
- Querying a database
- How to write a SELECT query
- How to write an INSERT query
- How to write an UPDATE query
- How to write a DELETE query
- Where to from fundamentals?
Bonus round:
- Don’t do these things in SQL Server
- Why you should not use SELECT *
- What is a DBA anyway?
- How does the Buffer Pool work? (part 1)
- How does the Buffer Pool work? (part 2)
Dates and times in SQL Server and Azure SQL Database
- The science of time (part 1)
- The science of time (part 2)
- DATETIME
- SMALLDATETIME
- DATE
- TIME
- DATETIME2
- DATETIMEOFFSET
- T-SQL functions to get the current date and time
- What about TIMESTAMP?
- More functions you should never use
- The problem with DATETIME
- DATEPART()
- DATENAME()
- AT TIME ZONE
- DATEADD()
- DATEDIFF() and DATEDIFF_BIG()
Proposed SQL Server defaults
- Cost threshold for parallelism
- Disable lightweight pooling
- Disable priority boost
- Optimize for ad hoc workloads
- Max server memory
How SQL Server stores data types
- Bit columns
- Dates and times
- DATETIMEOFFSET
- Integers and decimals
- Money
- Floating points
- GUIDs
- XML
sql_variant
Bonus round:
Photo by Paul Schafer on Unsplash.