For some reason by default you can have "AUTOCLOSE" property of your database set to ON. That's not bad, but if you check your server Event Log you can find a lot of entries like "Starting database 'xxxxxxx' ". And log is not a problem, but for sure this takes a time and slow down your asp.net application response.

You can turn it off in Managment Studio.
or you can run a little sql to update all databases on server:

EXECUTE sp_MSforeachdb

'

IF (''?'' NOT IN (''master'', ''tempdb'', ''msdb'', ''model''))

   EXECUTE (''ALTER DATABASE [?] SET AUTO_CLOSE OFF WITH NO_WAIT'')

'

All databases won't close automatically and response instantly.

Looking for rows with some duplicate values in some column(s) is very common. I'm not saying that's something hard.  I was asked about this. Here is the solution.

   1:  SELECT [Name], COUNT([Name]) as NumOccurrences 

   2:  FROM [People]

   3:  GROUP BY [Name]

   4:  HAVING ( COUNT( [Name] ) > 1 )

And the query to get all PKs ( primary keys ) for rows with duplicate [Name]:

   1:  SELECT [uid] 

   2:  FROM [People] 

   3:  WHERE [Name] IN (

   4:  SELECT [Name]

   5:  FROM [People]

   6:  GROUP BY [Name]

   7:  HAVING ( COUNT([Name]) > 1 ))

That's all.

During web development often task is to get some stuff in random order. For example, to display random articles, products, testimonials and so on.

First thing you want to do is to write something like this:

SELECT TOP 10 * 
FROM Articles 
ORDER BY RAND() 

And previous query DOES NOT work. It shows records in regular order. Why? Because RAND() calculated once, not in each row.

The following way works fine:

SELECT TOP 10 * 
FROM Articles 
ORDER BY NEWID() 

That's all. Nice and easy. Not recommended for HUGE tables... but this is crazy to try show something randomly from the huge table. Use other ways. For example sub queries.