T-SQL Awesomeness - 3 Ways to Write Cool SQL

Presenter: Audrey Hammonds

Session Details:

There’s nothing quite as satisfying as writing a cool bit of T-SQL. Luckily for us, there are some truly awesome ways to make your data do just what you need it to do, all while improving performance and/or readability. Come learn three new-school ways to expand your T-SQL repertoire with: 

-    Recursive Common Table Expressions (CTE)
-    EXCEPT and INTERSECT
-    CROSS APPLY and OUTER APPLY

The session will cover data models and development scenarios you might encounter that lend themselves to these techniques. See old-school ways to solve T-SQL challenges, and then compare alternate, new-school ways to get the same result set. Evaluating different approaches based on performance, readability, and maintainability, we’ll ask the important questions: Is it faster? Is it prettier? Can I hand it off to the new guy to maintain? 

For this 24 Hours of PASS session, we’ll have a little fun with it and look at alternate (bizarro) ways to take advantage of these already awesome T-SQL constructs.

About the Speaker:

Audrey Hammonds is a Database Developer in Atlanta, GA, and one half of the Datachix (www.datachix.com). She holds MCTS certifications in SQL Server 2008 Database Development and SQL Server 2008 Business Intelligence. Fifteen years ago, she volunteered for database training to escape the clutches of COBOL and has never looked back. A firm believer in good fundamentals and solid design, she gets her kicks from making data do nifty things.