TSQL - Pick Your Path, Choose Your Destiny, Solve it YOUR Way!

For many years, I have been an active contributor to the MSDN Forums, including one of my favorite forums, Transact-SQL. Besides the obvious benefit of helping customers solve their current SQL challenges, with each answer I provide I expand my knowledge and understanding of SQL Server.  Inevitably, after posting an answer, several other answers will be provided by the stars of the TSQL forum, each correct in that they solve the problem, but all syntactically very different.  It is from these answers where I learn and grow the most.  Oftentimes, I wish I could ask the people who provide the solutions for a summary of what they were thinking when they wrote the solution.  Are they considering query plans, performance, elegance, complexity, readability/maintainability, something else?  There are many different ways within SQL Server to solve the same problem and it is a great learning exercise to see various solutions.

With that, I am excited to introduce a new blog series that will focus on a single TSQL challenge per entry. I have reached out to a few of the top answerers in the TSQL forum and they graciously have agreed to contribute. With each entry, I will frame the problem, then provide solutions from different contributors along with their thoughts on HOW they solved the problem.  

The forums provide an endless set of topics for this series, so hopefully we can all work together to provide a good learning exercise to help everyone better understand TSQL.

Hope you enjoy,
Sam Lester (MSFT)

Comments

• Anonymous
  August 25, 2012
  Good luck!

• Anonymous
  August 25, 2012
  T-SQL is not my favorite topic about SQL Server ( I prefer SmO or SQL Server Data Access ) , anyway , i hope a full success for this new serie which , i am sure , will bring many useful ( at least ) informations. And i hope you will not be annoyed if i am using it to try to answer OP asking questions about T-SQL queries in the SQL Server Data Access Forum which is "invaded" since 3 months by questions related to the creation of T-SQL queries ( some moderators are moving them towards the TRANSACT-SQL forum where the "good" answers will be read by more numerous people rather than in a "specialised"  forum.. A little remark : what i think the most important point is that you will focus not in T-SQL recipes , but in providing the thoughts whic permit to obtain the final result ( it is so rare to see this way of thinking...)

• Anonymous
  August 27, 2012
  Hi Papy Normand, thanks for your feedback. I am also hoping we can focus more on the thought process than on the actual solutions since there are many different sites/blogs focusing on that aspect.  With the help of a couple very active forum contributors, I've started working on my first topic, which I'm hoping to publish in the next couple days.  The solutions are very different, so hopefully the contrast and explanations will be a good learning exercise.   Thanks, Sam

• Anonymous
  December 12, 2012
  Introduction: As part of the blog series TSQL - Solve it YOUR Way , today's topic will cover a question