Emil Drkusic

Learn SQL: SELECT statement

January 13, 2020 by

The SELECT statement is probably the most important SQL command. It’s used to return results from our database(s) and no matter how easy that could sound, it could be really very complex. In this article, we’ll give an intro to the SELECT statement and we’ll cover more complex stuff in the upcoming articles.

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Ben Richardson
Example Of Records Using A Clustered Index

Using SQL CREATE INDEX to create clustered and non-clustered indexes

January 10, 2020 by

The SQL CREATE INDEX statement is used to create clustered as well as non-clustered indexes in SQL Server. An index in a database is very similar to an index in a book. A book index may have a list of topics discussed in a book in alphabetical order. Therefore, if you want to search for any specific topic, you simply go to the index, find the page number of the topic, and go to that specific page number. Database indexes are similar and come handy. Particularly, if you have a huge number of records in your database, indexes can speed up the query execution process. There are two major types of indexes in SQL Server: clustered indexes and non-clustered indexes.

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Esat Erkec

Introduction to the sp_executesql stored procedure with examples

January 9, 2020 by

The sp_executesql is a built-in stored procedure in SQL Server that enables to execute of the dynamically constructed SQL statements or batches. Executing the dynamically constructed SQL batches is a technique used to overcome different issues in SQL programming sometimes. For example, when we want to determine the displayed columns in our reports, this procedure might be a solution option for us. In the simplest sense, this procedure takes a dynamically constructed SQL batch and other parameters, then execute it in the runtime and, finally, it returns the result.

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Nisarg Upadhyay
Database install script

Install and configure the AdventureWorks2016 sample database

January 9, 2020 by

This article explains the process of installing the AdventureWorks2016 and AdventureWorksDW2016 sample database on a stand-alone instance of SQL Server and Azure SQL Server. The sample databases were published by Microsoft to demonstrate how to design a database using SQL Server. Microsoft has also published another lightweight database named AdventureworksLT, which can be used as a sample database on Azure SQL Server.

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Emil Drkusic

Learn SQL: Foreign Key

January 7, 2020 by

In the previous article, we talked about the primary key (PK). In this one, we’ll check what is the foreign key (FK) and how it’s related to the primary key. This is the final step, after creating tables, inserting data, and defining primary keys, to cover all basics related to the database theory. There is much, much more than this, but if you understand these concepts, everything else is just expanding your knowledge around these basics.

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SQLShack

Best author award in 2019

January 3, 2020 by

2019 was a great year for the SQL Shack community, and 2020 is shaping up to be just as exciting. Thanks to our writers – SQL professionals and community members, we continue to spread the knowledge around the SQL community.

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Esat Erkec

An overview of the STRING_AGG function in SQL

January 3, 2020 by

In this article, we will explore the STRING_AGG function in SQL and we will also reinforce our learning with various examples. STRING_AGG function can be counted as a new member of the SQL aggregation functions and it was announced in SQL Server 2017. STRING_AGG function gathers all expression from rows and then puts it together in these rows expression in order to obtain a string. Additionally, this function takes a separator parameter that allows separating the expressions to be concatenated.

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