Most of the time in SQL Server, the MAX() function and a TOP(1) ORDER BY DESC will behave very similarly.
If you give them a rowstore index leading on the column in question, they’re generally smart enough to go to the correct end of the index, and – BOOP! – just pluck out the data you need without doing a big scan.
It’s T-SQL Tuesday’s 8 year birthday (or close enough), and Adam Machanic has challenged us with the question: what will the world be like when T-SQLTuesday turns 16?
SQL Server Management Studio version 17.5 adds a welcome feature for execution plans: a new visual attribute named EstimateRowsWithoutRowGoal.
Identifying that a query plan has been bossed around in Query Store can be a bit tricky, because it can appear in different ways.
Nope.
At least, not right now.
When I first created SQLWorkbooks, I distilled what it was all about down into one sentence: “Learn SQL Server by Solving Problems.”
This month, I introduce my first SQLChallenge, which distills that down into practice. The SQLChallenge features 23 minutes of video with scripts that you can use to reproduce and solve the problem yourself.
Do you ever need to use a text editor to apply regular expressions to files? If so, this post is for you! If not, you may wanna skip it and just return to it if you ever need it.
Copyright (c) 2025, Catalyze SQL, LLC; all rights reserved. Opinions expressed on this site are solely those of Kendra Little of Catalyze SQL, LLC. Content policy: Short excerpts of blog posts (3 sentences) may be republished, but longer excerpts and artwork cannot be shared without explicit permission.