SQL Server update processing is discussed in response to a question from a reader....

If you're of a vintage where the name "Bill Graham" means something to you, have I got a website for you.....

"Parent axis access", a long-standing performance bottleneck in accessing data stored within XML, is addressed via use of SQL Server 2005's new CROSS APPLY operator....

A requirement emerged recently for our team's database platform to support multiple versions of code within a single database. The database will know which users are running which versions of our front-end components, and will also know which versions of those components are tied to particular database versions. The challenge is one of maintainability. ...

COLUMNS_UPDATED() isn't much help if you've got expensive code to run when the value of a column changes....

Note that even though the ANSI SQL standard describes how various parts of the SELECT statement are evaluated, lot of it is left to implementation on how to produce the results....

In SQL Server, if you build an index on a column, and that column is NULL in a particular record, there WILL be a pointer to that row in the index. ...