This was asked on twitter recently and I gave the answer there. I decided to write a blog post about this because I can use over 140 charaters here instead.

You will see the Cannot resolve collation conflict for equal to operation error when you try to join 2 tables. let's take a look at what we need to do to resolve this. First create and populate these two tables

I see more and more people asking how to check if a temporary table exists. How do you check if a temp table exists?

You can use IF OBJECT_ID('tempdb..#temp') IS NOT NULL Let's see how it works

Straight from the man himself comes this statement posted in the microsoft.public.sqlserver.programming forum: “You need to read ISO-11179 so you use proper data element names. You

actually had “tbl-"on the table names! Sometimes “id” id a

prefix and sometimes it is a postfix.“

Of course you know who I am talking about? No? Joe Celko of course. So what is ISO-11179?

The ...

SQL performance tuning is probably one of those things you can do to really make a HUGE difference in performance. Let’s put this in perspective: take a typical application, if you can improve the performance by 100% then you really made a huge improvement. You can improve a SQL query by 1000% with 2 lines of code (sometimes all you have to do is take away a % sign). If you can make a query sargable so that the optimizer can do an index seek instead of an index scan your query might go from 12 seconds to 200 milliseconds. Now try doing that in an application, even if you change all th...