TNWiki Article Spotlight - SQL Server, Unpivot vs Apply

Welcome to another edition of Tuesday - TNWiki Article Spotlight.

Part one: Our Article Spotlight

We want to read all, we want to see all, and we want to learn all… We are the TechNet community members!

Unfortunately there are only 24 hours a day. We can't do everything so we must choose specific fields of interest to spend our time on and the rest remain on our to do list. Dozens of publications in various fields are published each week. Once a week a specific article is chosen by the TNWiki Ninjas to be spotlit. Here it is, yes It's the time for another Tuesday Article Spotlight…

Today's article is "SQL Server: Unpivot vs Apply" by Martin Smith. The article won the Transact-SQL Category for TechNet Guru Awards September 2015. In this article Martin covers some case studies regarding the uses of UNPIVOT and CROSS APPLY operation, he examines the execution plans for several solutions and discusses differences in performance.

The article is well written and easy to follow. It gives a simple explanation of how to reproduce each case step-by-step. A wide audience is targeted since it can help any developer working with SQL Server as well as DBAs. Please read the comments and  join the discussion, in order to improve the article even more.

Part two: choosing the next Article Spotlight

As the name suggests, every week the TechNet bloggers team focuses on one article which is chosen to be on the spotlight of the weekly blog. While the blog title "Article Spotlight" is pretty clear to me, I keep asking myself "WHY" and "HOW". Why are specific articles chosen and how will the next one be selected? You might think that the answers are "because this is the best article", but in reality no one reads all the articles, and the criteria vary. The only obvious point is that the article caught the eye of someone, but why and how?

Do you want your article in the spotlight of the TechNet WIKI, next time? What should be the criteria to choose the next article? Should it be only in accordance to the technical content? Or may be due to the article's format, its look and feel? Or can you suggest other criteria? Please help us to choose the next Article Spotlight! Feel free to add your ideas and your thoughts here (you can even recommend an article if you want, at the TechNet WIKI Facebook group).

 

Have fun :-)
Ronen Ariely (aka PITUACH),

Direct link to the article: https://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/32230.sql-server-unpivot-vs-apply.aspx