Sql-server – SQL Server data structure (in protocol)

Yes, IMHO you should disable named pipes and use only TCP/IP for better performance. You can force this in the connection strings for your apps and change them one at a time, rather than just shutting off named pipes and then getting a bunch of complaints:

Data Source = tcp:IP-or-host-name[\instance-name]

Don't shut off named pipes until all your apps are using TCP/IP. You can check what your apps are using via sys.dm_exec_connections.net_transport - this will have values such as TCP or Shared Memory. You can check the program too via a query like this:

SELECT c.net_transport, s.program_name, c.client_net_address
  FROM sys.dm_exec_sessions AS s
  INNER JOIN sys.dm_exec_connections AS c
  ON s.session_id = c.session_id;

However, for your second question, using one login or multiple logins won't affect performance much unless you're at the upper end and exceeding your pooled connections limit. In most cases consolidating into a single login will just make it much harder to later audit etc.

Thank you for SQLfiddle and sample data! I wish more questions started this way.

If you want all members regardless of whether they have an entry for that date, you want a LEFT OUTER JOIN. You were very close with this version however a little trick with outer joins is that if you add a filter to the outer table in the WHERE clause, you turn an outer join to an inner join, because it will exclude any rows that are NULL on that side (because it doesn't know if NULL would match the filter or not).

I modified the first query to get a row for every member:

SELECT Members.Member_ID
      ,Time_Entry.Date_Start
      ,Time_Entry.Hours_Actual
      ,Time_Entry.Hours_Bill
FROM dbo.Members
  LEFT OUTER JOIN dbo.Time_Entry
--^^^^ changed from FULL to LEFT
  ON Members.Member_ID = Time_Entry.Member_ID
  AND Time_Entry.Date_Start = '20131110';
--^^^ changed from WHERE to AND

I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader to take it from there and add the other columns, formatting, COALESCE etc.

Some other notes:

• please always use the schema prefix when creating and referencing objects

• please always use a length when converting to varchar etc.

• stay away from ambiguous, regional date formats like mm-dd-yyyy

• consider using aliases to make your queries easier to read. E.g. the above could be re-written as:

  SELECT m.Member_ID
    ,t.Date_Start
    ,t.Hours_Actual
    ,t.Hours_Bill
  FROM dbo.Members AS m
  LEFT OUTER JOIN dbo.Time_Entry AS t
  ON m.Member_ID = t.Member_ID
  AND t.Date_Start = '20131110';
  

  ... a lot tidier, IMHO, as long as you use sensible aliases.