Derek Wilson

Derek Wilson delivers tactical and strategic Business Intelligence and Enterprise Architecture solutions. His primary focus in on Microsoft SQL Server technologies and aligning business problems to technology solutions. He architects BI solutions leveraging SQL Server, SharePoint and any other technologies that help his clients achieve better data driven decisions. By leveraging the information learned while collecting requirements for BI projects, he helps align business processes to technology helping further organizations Enterprise Architecture. He is an author, trainer, blogger and has been using SQL Server since version 6.5.

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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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Forums

Server-Level Table sizes

By Artur Sanin

Comments posted to this topic are about the item Server-Level Table sizes

ORDER BY alias

By aniap

Comments posted to this topic are about the item ORDER BY alias

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

By vgupta

Comments posted to this topic are about the item Optional Parameter Plan Optimization in...

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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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