Matthew McGiffen

I started my career in IT as a developer with Visual Basic, C# and ASP working with SQL Server backends. For the last ten years though I’ve focused on the SQL Server side of things. Currently I’m working for a leading software vendor for the financial industry as a DBA, doing a mixture of development and data architecture. If I have a speciality it is in making things run faster.

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Blog Post

SQL Server Wishlist

This month for T-SQL Tuesday Kevin Chant asks us what our fantasy SQL feature would be. https://www.kevinrchant.com/2019/09/03/t-sql-tuesday-118-your-fantasy-sql-feature/ I think it’s appropriate to give a shout-out to Microsoft at this...

2019-09-11

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Blogs

T-SQL Tuesday #202 SQL Server Outage You’ll Never Forget: A Roundup

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When I put together the invitation for T-SQL Tuesday #202, I wasn't sure what...

A Last Minute Trip to the EU

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

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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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