Advanced T-SQL Triage: The Art of Fixing Terrible Code

In this full-day festival of query-fixing, Erik Darling will lead you through the real-world mysteries of advanced T-SQL

You’ve seen it before: the procedure that looks like it was generated by an AI trained on Stack Overflow and despair. It’s got MERGE. It’s got RIGHT JOINs. It’s got logic so tangled you’d need a flowchart, a flashlight, and a therapist to debug it. And now… it’s your problem.

In this full-day festival of query-fixing, Erik Darling will lead you through the real-world mysteries of advanced T-SQL: the strange, the slow, and the occasionally cursed. You’ll tackle tangled paging logic, rescue window functions and indexed views from spools and spills, and finally learn when to keep a CTE—and when to yeet it. We’ll refactor data modifications that block like linebackers, decode procedural patterns, and write dynamic SQL that’s powerful and polite.

You’ll learn when to CROSS APPLY, dig into views vs. inline TVFs, and discover why RIGHT JOIN is not simply LEFT JOIN’s syntactic twin. We’ll uncover when user-defined functions wreck your query execution plans—and how to rewrite them with flair. If you’ve ever been curious about why that query sometimes takes SO long and how to best rewrite it without just guessing, this is your playground.

Expect fast demos, big laughs, and a glorious cheat sheet to take home. Because refactoring SQL isn’t just necessary—it’s super fun when you're in the right party.