SQL Server, SSIS, SSAS and maybe even SSRS rants and raves (and, on occasion, useful code or designs).

All authors

All authors

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

By

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

By

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

Read the latest Blogs

Forums

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...

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...

Visit the forum

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