Invitation for T-SQL Tuesday #002: A Puzzling Situation

Welcome to the second installment of T-SQL Tuesday, the monthly SQL Server blog party! Last month’s kickoff event was a great success, and I’m really excited for this month’s theme. I hope that we see even more bloggers, with even more great posts this time around–so please spread the word!

Theme

Have you ever found yourself unable to figure out the intricacies of how some piece of code works? Ever been confused by the results you’ve gotten back from a query, only to find out that something totally unrelated was going on? Or have you ever been compelled to wile away your spare time working on a “challenge” posted by some blogger?

For this month’s T-SQL Tuesday, I’m asking participants to write a blog post on a “puzzling” topic, along the lines of some of the following ideas:

• Describe a confusing situation you encountered, and explain how you debugged the problem and what the resolution was
• Show a piece of code that doesn’t behave as most people might expect, and illustrate the reasoning behind the discrepancy
• Create a challenge for your readers to solve

As always, even given the event’s name the posts are not limited to T-SQL! Any component of, or software product related to SQL Server, is fair game. MDX, SSIS, LINQ to SQL, Entity Data Model, NHibernate, and any other software product that deals with SQL Server data can be featured in your post. Be creative!

Rules

As before, any blogger can–and should–feel free to participate in this event. In order to make the event slightly more international, I’m changing the time range from PST-based to UTC-based. So the rules are:

• Your post must go live between 00:00:00 UTC and 23:59:00 UTC on Tuesday, January 12, 2010
• Your post must link back to this one, and it’s recommended that you clearly identify the post as a T-SQL Tuesday post
• You are responsible for ensuring that a trackback or comment appears here so that I can find the posts

Follow the rules, and your post will be included in the roundup to be posted on January 13 or 14. Don’t follow the rules, and it won’t show up there. Simple as that!

Twitter

Follow the event on Twitter by watching for the #TSQL2sDay hash tag.

Additional Notes

If you put in a comment and your post doesn’t follow the other rules, I will ignore your post. (Really sorry to have to add this, but a couple of people felt the need to do that last time and it violates the spirit of the event. Especially the person who tried to spoof a trackback, without any kind of link in the initiating post. If you’re not going to link back to the invitation post, please don’t bother participating, now or ever.)

Per the rules outlined last time, I’m hosting again this month, and starting next month the event will rotate around to other blogs. I’ll control the schedule even once the event leaves here, so please let me know if you’re interested in hosting–either with a comment, a Twitter DM, or an e-mail–and I’ll add you to the list. To host, you must have participated in two previous T-SQL Tuesday events, and your blog must have had at least one post a month for the prior six months.

I’m also collecting topic ideas, and would appreciate your sending them over as you think of them so that we can ensure that we have plenty of material to keep this event running for years to come.

Enjoy, and as always let me know if you have comments, questions, concerns, etc.