2012 T-SQL Tuesdays

T-SQL Tuesday #037 – Joins

Invitation and roundup from Sebastian Meine.

The Invite

As many of you know already, I decided to declare December 2012 as the month of the JOIN by writing the A Join A Day blog series. So, it should be quite obvious what this month T-SQL Tuesday is about. You guessed correctly — I would like you to join me in talking about joins. Now you might think “If Sebastian is writing 31 posts about JOINs already there is nothing left to write about.” But I can assure you that there is still plenty out there. In my series I am going to cover just the basics. For example, what is a cross join or an anti-semi-join? What is the difference between a hash and a merge join? There are many things I won’t be able to cover, for example how to write efficient join queries.

Your mission – should you accept – is to write about topics like the good and the bad patterns of joining you have seen out there or really anything else that comes to your mind when thinking about joins:

  • Have you had to deal with a slow monster join that you were able to conquer? Let us know how you did it.
  • Have you noticed a join pattern in use that is really not good for readability but you come across it time and time again? Tell us how to do it better.
  • Have you discovered a really cool way of using the APPLY command instead of a JOIN to force the execution engine to utilize the existing CPU resources more effectively? We would like to hear about it.

And if you have a topic that you always wanted to write about but that is only remotely related to joins, feel free to use it anyway and make sure to tell us why you think it is related to joins.

Hope to see you (or at least your post) next week at the party.