Chris

Chris started in computing and I.T. in the mid to late 1990's. After the dust had settled from Y2K, he found himself a bit more focused and working with database servers on the Unix platform. His first exposure to SQL Server was in 2007 and he has been working on that platform ever since. Chris is currently a Sr. SQL Server DBA in more of a DevOps role with a main focus on operational reliability, stability and performance. His specialty is automation. He truly enjoys the days he gets to spend building tools with PowerShell to help his fellow DBA's manage their ever growing SQL Server environment.

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Blog Post

QDS Forced Plans - Gotchas and Limitations

Released with SQL Server 2016, Query Data Store was a game changer for performance tuning. Right from Microsoft’s website: The SQL Server Query Store feature provides you with...

2020-10-20 (first published: )

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Blogs

A Last Minute Trip to the EU

By

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

By vgupta

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AI Experience Gap that we keep talking about

By Pat Wright

Comments posted to this topic are about the item AI Experience Gap that we...

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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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