Since I saw a request, I'll post a short overview of the outer join vs inner join. There is nothing really complex about them and you can read about them in a million SQL books, but I'll take a stab at it anyway. The most common scenario where outer joins...

I am going to proceed to some lengthy and boring esoterica of ORDER BY, but as a reminder, you can influence the choice of topics pretty easily by posting comments with your favorites :-). This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers...

So, when your query specification has an explicit GROUP BY, your choices in what to use in post-grouping clauses (SELECT, HAVING, ORDER BY) are limited. You can only use aggregate functions, expressions in the GROUP BY list, or constants. An interesting...

Earlier, I explained what exactly a query specification is. It is important to note that query specifications come in two very different varieties: grouped and not. A query specification is grouped if it has any of the following: GROUP BY clause, HAVING...

Thanks to everyone who commented on parameterization in TSQL. It was a pretty eye-opening experience to see the lack of "extended" parameterization (beyond simple runtime values) being such a pain point for the users. I'll make sure your voices are heard...

Here is an interesting comment from chrisbro about some features he finds sorely missing in TSQL: * Can't specify a parameter to be used as an IN clause * Can't easily specify parameters to be used in the ORDER BY clause; especially painful to do multiple...

Let's start from basics, if it looks boring, feel free skip to the next post :-). I just feel I need to establish some terminology first. The main building block of SQL is what the standard calls "query specification". It consists of "clauses": SELECT...

My name is not actually TSQL language :-), I am Eugene Zabokritski, a Technical Lead working in the TSQL front-end team of the SQL Engine group. My plan is to post a series of overviews of some TSQL areas that I think are complicated enough to warrant...