This example demonstrates cursor-like actions without cursor overhead and performance related problems that show up when using them. The main reason a cursor is built is for looping through a result set one row at a time and performing an action based on the data in that row. Here is a short query ... [More]

SQL Server 2005 provides a mechanism called CTE or Common Table Expressions for pre-loading data or setting up for later use.  It is really fast compared to pre-2005 which did not have such a feature. To illustrate I'll take some hierarchical data and load it into a CTE.  This would be a ... [More]

With a number of clients, I have been provided a sample format for a transactions along with instructions to develop a process to load it into a database as quickly and painlessly as possible.  This usually comes with the requirements that the XML data file can have any number of records from 1... [More]