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Author: Aaron Bertrand

Aaron is a Staff Database Reliability Engineer at Stack Overflow. We don't want to say he's old, but his experience dates back to a time when SQL Server 6.5 was considered "modern." He writes here at sqlperformance.com, over at sqlblog.org, and at MSSQLTips.
How much impact can a data type choice have?

I've long been a proponent of choosing the correct data type. I've talked about some examples in a previous "Bad Habits" blog post, but this weekend at SQL Saturday #162 (Cambridge, UK), the topic of using DATETIME by default came up. In a conversation after my T-SQL : Bad Habits and Best Practices presentation, a user stated that they just use DATETIME even if they only need granularity to the minute or day, this way the date/time columns across their enterprise are always the same data type. I suggested that this might be wasteful, and that the consistency might not be worth it, but today I decided to set out to prove my theory.

  ◆  September 13, 2012
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Database smarter with deeper insights for Microsoft SQL
What is the most efficient way to trim time from datetime?

The most common need for stripping time from a datetime value is to get all the rows that represent orders (or visits, or accidents) that occurred on a given day. However, not all of the techniques that are used to do so are efficient or even safe. If you want a safe range query that performs well, use an open-ended range or, for single-day queries on SQL Server 2008 and above, use CONVERT(DATE). Read on to discover why…

  ◆  September 5, 2012
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What is the fastest way to calculate the median?

Medians require sorting. Sorting in SQL Server is typically a pretty expensive operation if there isn't a supporting index, and adding an index to support an operation which probably isn't requested that often may not be worthwhile. This post explores the performance characteristics of several solutions to the median problem.

  ◆  August 29, 2012
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Performance impact of different error handling techniques

People wonder whether they should do their best to prevent exceptions, or just let the system handle them. I've seen several discussions where folks debate whether they should do whatever they can to prevent an exception, because error handling is "expensive." There is no doubt that error handling isn't free, but I would predict that a constraint violation is at least as efficient as checking for a potential violation first. This may be different for a key violation than a static constraint violation, for example, but in this post I'm going to focus on the former.

  ◆  August 22, 2012
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Conditional Order By

A common scenario in many client-server applications is allowing the end user to dictate the sort order of results. Some people want to see the lowest priced items first, some want to see the newest items first, and some want to see them alphabetically. This is a complex thing to achieve in Transact-SQL because you can't just throw @SortColumn and @SortDirection into a straight T-SQL query.

  ◆  August 8, 2012
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