SQL Saturday 32 — ABCs of CTEs Deck

I’d like to thank Pam Shaw (twitter as @pamshaw) and Jorge Nunez (twitter as @sqlchicken) for letting me come down to Tampa this past weekend to present at SQL Saturday #32.  Jeez, that picture doesn’t make me look very happy.  For someone like me that tends to forget to take time off, this is a great way to get out and travel and still feel like I’m being a workaholic.

The session I presented was ABCs of CTEs.  Here’s the description of the session:

Common Table Expressions (CTE) aren’t as common as their name implies.  CTEs are often seen as a secret part of the dark art of recursion.  This session will explore CTEs to show how they can be extremely useful in improving performance and legibility of T-SQL code.  And, of course, we will look at their use in returning recursive data.

I put this session together a couple years ago when I realized I was behind the ball in leveraging CTEs into the T-SQL that I was writing.  And after asking around found there was a lot of confusion surrounding their use.  Hopefully, people that sat through the session go something out of it.

I’ve uploaded the slide deck to the SQL Saturday site but for those that just want the information now… here’s the presentation material: