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#BackToBasics: A Challenge for 2016

Originally published December 31, 2015.

A few days ago, my good friend Tim Ford (@sqlagentman) tweeted this:

TimChallenge_Compressed

Thinking about it, yes, in both my writing and my speaking, I’ll often make some kind of “lowest common denominator” assumption about my audience. A few quick examples off the top of my head:

  • I don’t need to explain the difference between a seek and a scan.
  • Surely nobody needs me to define CTE or tell them what it stands for.
  • Everyone knows why SELECT * is bad.

I plan to take Tim up on his challenge, and hope to post an introductory blog post on the first Wednesday of each month in 2016. I think this will be more realistic for me to achieve than some of these “30 posts in 30 days” series that some of my colleagues have mastered, but it will still be challenging to come up with 12 distinct ideas and present them in an introductory way.

Today, I am taking Madeline to the alumni game at Gillette, and tomorrow Nicole and I will be enjoying the Winter Classic, but after that I’m going to get started. I already have an idea for my first post. Who’s with me?

In any case, Happy New Year, and I hope your 2016 is even better than your 2015.

Month Topic
January Common Table Expressions (CTEs)
February The “Runaway” Query
March The Beauty of the Synonym
April Dating Responsibly
May Definitions of SQL Server release acronyms
June An Updated “Kitchen Sink” Example
July DATEFROMPARTS()
August Great Debates : Unicode
September Naming Stored Procedures
October Why I use lower case for data type names (now)
November CAST vs. CONVERT
December Are your backups worthless?

Aaron (@AaronBertrand) is a Data Platform MVP with industry experience dating back to Classic ASP and SQL Server 6.5. He is editor-in-chief of the performance-related blog, SQLPerformance.com.

Aaron’s blog focuses on T-SQL bad habits and best practices, as well as coverage of updates and new features in Plan Explorer, SentryOne, and SQL Server.

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