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The day-to-day pressures of a DBA team, and how we can work smarter with automation and AI

What a DBA team actually deals with There are many issues a DBA team faces, from servers going down to login access not being requested on time. These are not glamorous problems, but they are the problems that stop everyone else doing their jobs. In a modern environment you would expect a lot of the […]

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2026-04-13

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Creating a Simple and Flexible Random Password Generator in SQL Server

Generating temporary passwords is a common requirement in many applications. Users may need to reset a forgotten password, new accounts may require an initial password, or developers may generate test credentials. While password generation is often implemented in application code, doing it directly in SQL Server provides clear advantages. It centralizes the logic, ensures consistency […]

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2026-04-10

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Question of the Day

ORDER BY alias

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) + 1
Which of the following queries produces the expected ordering and why? (Select all correct)

See possible answers