I commend Aaron Bertrand (blog and twitter) for his latest series of blogs titled, “Bad habits to kick”. These types of blogs are always good for even the experienced groups. I say that because I can pretty much guarantee that some of you are doing the things he points out in this series. You may not know you do them or even understand the fact they are bad habits but I can say for sure, this is a great way to find out what they are and the explanations needed to get you out of the habits.

It’s always good to remind ourselves of some of the things we may be doing in our daily jobs that really are bad habits.

Here is Aaron Bertrand’s listing. The ones in bold are my favorite out of the list.

Bad habits to kick : mis-handling date / range queries

Bad habits to kick : using alias types

Bad habits to kick : using the visual designers

Bad habits to kick : abusing triggers

Bad habits to kick : choosing the wrong data type

Bad habits to kick : making assumptions about IDENTITY

Bad habits to kick : inconsistent naming conventions

Bad habits to kick : avoiding the schema prefix

Bad habits to kick : using SELECT * / omitting the column list

Bad habits to kick : using SELECT or RETURN instead of OUTPUT

Bad habits to kick : using dashes and spaces in entity names

Bad habits to kick : declaring VARCHAR without (length)

Bad habits to kick : using table aliases like (a, b, c) or (t1, t2, t3)

Bad habits to kick : using old-style JOINs

Bad habits to kick : using loops to populate large tables

Bad habits to kick : ORDER BY ordinal

Guess I could have just bolded them all since they are all very good 🙂