5 Essential SQL Skills Every Developer Should Know
summary
Practical checklist: use clustered vs non‑clustered indexes deliberately (SQL Server defaults to an 8KB page), prefer narrow keys and put the most selective column first, add covering index columns with INCLUDE to avoid lookups, and rebuild indexes to prevent page splits. For heavy writes consider separate write‑optimized and read‑optimized tables (example: ~1M inserts/day). Know join algorithms—nested loop, merge (key‑ordered), and hash join—and watch memory to avoid a hash bailout. Make queries SARGable, avoid SELECT *, and favor set operations over cursors.
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