On Wednesday, Sept 21, 2011 at 6:30pm EST, I’ll be presenting Banish RBAR! to the Hampton Roads SQL Server User Group. I’ll be presenting to the user group live, so this won’t be available online.

The abstract for this presentation is:

SQL Server is primarily designed for set-based operations, so code that performs Row-By-Agonizing-Row (RBAR) operations is going against the design, rather than working with it. Come to this code filled session, where we will examine several recent additions to SQL Server, and learn how the vast majority of RBAR code can be replaced with efficient, set-based code. Learn how the APPLY operator works; iterate through incoming data just once with the MERGE statement; “slice and dice” your data with the Windowing (ranking) functions; re-write your multi-statement table-valued functions to inline functions to help the optimizer and speed up your queries; learn how to create a grouped delimited list – without loops!