See how SQL Server 2025 uses Optional Parameter Plan Optimization to create separate plans for selective and unfiltered searches, how to verify the dispatcher and variants, and when dynamic SQL or recompilation is still the better choice.
2026-09-14
7 reads
Normally when you're looking at an execution plan, and you see an index seek followed by a key lookup, that means it's running relatively quickly.
2026-09-14
Learn how the bitwise functions SET_BIT() and GET_BIT() can be used to manage data stored inside a single column.
2026-09-11
1,981 reads
Anyone who’s spent years writing T-SQL has a mental list of “why doesn’t SQL Server just do this already?” moments. Here are 9 of those from Louis Davidson’s perspective – a wish list of practical, coding-oriented feature requests drawn from real-world pain points.
2026-09-11
If you've spent years writing SQL for a living, you already know how this goes. Someone pings you on Teams asking, "How many active customers do we have in the Midwest this quarter?" There you are, back in the query editor, writing a JOIN you've written fifty times before. Genie Spaces in Databricks is built […]
2026-09-09
1,823 reads
Azure Arc-enabled SQL Server is designed to bring on-premises and multi-cloud SQL Server instances under centralized Azure management, but a newly documented privilege escalation technique shows how that same management workflow can be turned against the server it’s meant to protect.
2026-09-09
If you own a business application, you’re accountable for its uptime, its cost, and its performance, even if you’ve never opened SQL Server Management Studio in your life. But most guidance out there is written for DBAs, not for the people who actually make decisions about the app.
This webinar on Sept 16 is different. We’ll walk through real findings from real SQL Server environments — the kind of things that quietly cause slow page loads, failed backups, and surprise outages — and translate each one into what it actually means for you: What did it cost? What was the risk? What would you have needed to ask your team (or your vendor) to catch it sooner?
2026-09-09
tl;dr The title says it all. Prologue One of the keys to my personal learning is that, very early in my database career, I taught myself how to make lot’s of rows of Random Constrained Data in a comparatively short time. With the help of a few good folks over time, the method has been […]
2026-09-07 (first published: 2023-09-18)
5,828 reads
This guide has everything you need to know about JSON indexing in SQL Server 2025: what it is, how it works, and current limitations.
2026-09-07
See how SQL Server's Parameter Sensitive Plan optimization handles skewed parameters, how to verify dispatcher plans, and where PSP still falls short.
2026-09-04
3,242 reads
I’m excited to announce the release of a new open-source project that fully automates...
One of my favourite features of SQL Server 2022 was the T-SQL Snapshot Backups....
By Steve Jones
I have said and written this many times: Redgate Software is the type of...
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Optional Parameter Plan Optimization in...
Comments posted to this topic are about the item AI Experience Gap that we...
There is a table tmp_tab:
CREATE TABLE tmp_tab ( id int, val int );
INSERT INTO tmp_tab VALUES (1, 1), (2, NULL), (3, 3), (4, 4), (5, 5);You want to order the rows ids by the following expression:
ISNULL(val, id) + 1Which of the following queries produces the expected ordering and why? (Select all correct) See possible answers