SQL Server Cheat Sheet

This is a post about a SQL Server cheat sheet, but not yet. First we need to talk about the history of the cheat sheet. It is long, mostly unwritten and frequently smudged.

In the Beginning Was the Cave Wall

The first cheat sheet was painted on a cave wall. It showed a red berry with a large, angry line through it. Historians agree it was painted the morning after a long and regrettable night.

It worked beautifully. Everyone who read it lived longer. Everyone who didn’t read it became a convincing example. And so the first rule of cheat sheets was born: somebody suffered, so you don’t have to.

The Recipe Card That Cheats You

A few thousand years later came the recipe card. It was written by a grandparent, in pencil, in a code nobody else alive can read.

Salt: a pinch. Flour: enough. Bake until it looks right. This is the only cheat sheet in history that contains every answer and not a single number. Every family owns one. Every family has followed it exactly, once, and produced a brick.

The Great Exam Paradox

Then came school, and the strangest discovery in the long history of cheating.

A student decides to make a cheat sheet for the big exam. They write it small. They write it neat. They squeeze a whole semester onto something the size of a gum wrapper. Then they walk into the exam and discover they remember all of it.

Writing the cheat sheet was the studying. Teachers know this. They keep quiet about it, because then nobody would make one.

The Fridge Door

Every home has a second cheat sheet, and it lives on the fridge. It holds an emergency number, a takeout menu, a magnet from a city nobody remembers visiting and a drawing that is either a horse or a cloud.

Nobody reads it. Everybody would panic if it fell off.

The Five Laws of the Cheat Sheet

Scientists have never studied cheat sheets. That’s a shame, because cheat sheets obey their laws more faithfully than apples obey gravity. Here they are.

1. A cheat sheet is never where you left it. It is in the other bag.
2. The coffee ring always lands on the one line you need.
3. If it isn’t on the front, it’s on the back. If it isn’t on the back, you have the old version.
4. Every cheat sheet grows until it becomes a textbook. Then somebody makes a cheat sheet for the textbook.
5. The person who taped it to the wall left the company years ago. The tape is still there. So is the sheet. Nobody dares to touch it.

And Then Came the Database

Which brings us, at long last, to databases.

Database people are cheat sheet people. We type some commands every day and others twice a year, at 2 a.m., while something is on fire. Nobody remembers how to restore a database to a new folder until the exact moment it matters. Nobody remembers PIVOT at all. We copy the last one that worked and hope.

So I made one. It’s a SQL Server cheat sheet for 2025, four pages long, and it obeys most of the laws above. It breaks law number two on purpose. Every query on it ran on SQL Server 2025 before it went in. Every script is on the page as well. Spill your coffee wherever you like. The answers are still online.

Here it is: SQL Server 2025 Cheat Sheet: Every Query Tested, Free PDF. Print it, tape it next to your monitor, and leave a note for whoever inherits your desk. They will thank you. They will not take it down either.

A cheat sheet is not cheating, it is remembering on purpose.

Published by Pinal Dave on SQLAuthority. More of my work at pinaldave.com.