T-SQL Tuesday #024: The Roundup

Thanx to everyone for their contributions to T-SQL Tuesday #024: Prox ‘n’ Funx.

The roundup is finally here… Well, shux, I’ve been so busy that I almost let it fall through the crax, but before weex and weex went by, I finally read through the stax of submissions. I certainly had a lot of kix reading them… you could hear shriex of delight coming out of my office window.

(Okay, I admit it… The roundup was late because I spent a lot of time looking up words that end with a -ks sound… It loox like you can count me among the ranx of freax ‘n’ geex ‘n’ punx ‘n’ jerx ‘n’ dorx ‘n’ quax who carry something a little too far… It stinx, doesn’t it?).

Methinx it was a success! The SQL Community rox!

But don’t take it from me… Read the submissions for yourself. Click on the linx below for some good reading.

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) Contributions
 

Rob Farley contributes a wonderfully detailed post comparing inline functions and non-inline functions, filled with lots of examples and query plans. Rob categorically states that “if it’s not inline, it’s rubbish.” I couldn’t agree more, but then again, I’m always a sucker for any blog post that uses the word “rubbish”.

Noel McKinney talks about a situation concerning the abuse and overuse of stored procedures. Imagine a database that is completely devoid of data and yet consumes truckloads of disk space… because it houses 27,000 stored procedures! A good story to keep in the back of your mind in designing solutions.

Greg Lucas gives us a detailed explanation of a useful ExceptionHandler procedure that is designed to be used in the CATCH block of a TRY…CATCH construct, logging detailed information about the error in a table. It encapsulates and standardizes error handling so that the developer can save time in coding.

Michael J. Swart talks about some interesting numbers related to stored procedures. At first I thought it would be the usual numbers like “maximum parameters allowed” and “maximum nested levels”, but if you know Michael, then you know he wouldn’t only spout out dry statistics like that. By the time you finish his list, you’ll be struggling to catch your breath from laughing.

Kent Chenery joins T-SQL Tuesday for the first time, contributing a CLR routine for calculating Easter in any given year. That’s pretty cool… I never even thought about the fact that an algorithm existed for calculating Easter. Make sure you read the Wikipedia article he references… the detail behind the algorithm is fascinating.

Steve Wales is another first-time contributor to T-SQL Tuesday. He talks about the differences in coding procedures and functions between SQL Server and that other database created by that company in my neck of the woods, Oracle. He also provides a link to an earlier post of his that warns about the fact that you have to be aware of the compatibility mode when using built-in functions.

Merrill Aldrich offers his ode to composable solutions, illustrating how table-valued functions (and views) offer maximum composability and flexibility (and that stored procedures don’t offer that same flexibility). As a rabid fan of TVF’s, I couldn’t agree more.

Aaron Bertrand wrote a terrific post on the shortcomings of INFORMATION_SCHEMA views earlier this month, but he waited for T-SQL Tuesday to post his pièce de résistance, plunging the knife deeper in talking about INFORMATION_SCHEMA.ROUTINES (and syscomments and sp_helptext) and how they just don’t cut it in getting the full procedure definition.

Pinal Dave talks about the new CUME_DIST() analytic function in SQL2012, which provides a really cool easy-to-implement percentile-calculating capability. Pinal’s post is the first of a series of blog posts about the new SQL2012 analytic functions… make sure you add them to your must-read list.

Rich Brown tells us about the benefits of using stored procedures for Reporting Services datasets, abstracting away the data layer from the presentation layer. He also brings up an interesting idea of putting Reporting Services procedures into their own schema.

Bob Pusateri gives an overview of the pros and cons of both procedures and functions. Speaking of procedures, though, I have to also mention that I found Bob’s post of October 18th to be very interesting in terms of using a cool trick of using sp_executesql to create a view in another database besides the current one.

Kerry Tyler discusses scenarios (and some myths) regarding transactions being left open by procedures that produce errors or experience timeouts, concluding with a discussion on XACT_ABORT.

Jes Schultz Borland expresses her frustration about the fact that a Reporting Services dataset only recognizes the first result set from a procedure that produces multiple result sets. It is confusing, being that the term dataset has different meanings across platforms (in .NET the dataset class truly is a collection of datatables).

Thomas Rushton makes a “Hell yes” case in answer to the question, “Should I learn to use stored procedures?” And he follows up with a second contribution talking about the best practice in releasing stored procedure scripts (or scripts for any kind of object for that matter).

Jason Brimhall talks about functions… specifically functions that he is thankful for, functions he can’t live without, and functions that he had fun with in delving into SQL Server internals. I’m going to set aside some time to read more about those.

Nancy Hidy Wilson reminds us of the myriad of information we can glean from the good old SERVERPROPERTY() function… and she reminds us to check out DATABASEPROPERTY() and DATABASEPROPERTYEX() as well.

David Howard discussed bad plans resulting from parameter sniffing and gave a list of techniques to solve the problem.

And, finally, my contribution talked about a procedure that I use to deal with a client system that contains no stored procedures at all… it finds the original text of ad-hoc queries in a Forced Parameterization database.

Thanx again for your contributions!