Brian Knight

Brian Knight, MCSE, MCDBA, is on the Board of Directors for the Professional Association for SQL Server (PASS) and runs the local SQL Server users group in Jacksonville. Brian is a contributing columnist for SQL Magazine and also maintains a weekly column for the database website SQLServerCentral.com. He is the author of Admin911: SQL Server (Osborne/McGraw-Hill Publishing) and co-author of Professional SQL Server DTS (Wrox Press). Brian is a Senior SQL Server Database Consultant at Alltel in Jacksonville and spends most of his time deep in DTS and SQL Server.

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Blogs

A Last Minute Trip to the EU

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My life has some crazy travel stretches for sure. Between speaking, office visits, customer...

Part 3 of 3: Tuning DiskANN — R, Alpha, L, Beam Width, Recall and Latency

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In Part 1, we saw how ‘Vamana’ represents vectors as nodes, connects them with...

Automated SQL Server Benchmarking with HammerDB and Docker: A Complete Testing Framework

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I’m excited to announce the release of a new open-source project that fully automates...

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ORDER BY alias

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Optional Parameter Plan Optimization in SQL Server 2025: Fixing the Kitchen-Sink Search Procedure

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AI Experience Gap that we keep talking about

By Pat Wright

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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)

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