Monica Rathbun

Monica lives in Virginia and is a Microsoft MVP for Data Platform. She has over 15 years of experience working with a wide variety of database platforms with a focus on SQL Server. She is a frequent speaker at IT industry conferences on topics including performance tuning and configuration management. She is the Leader of the Hampton Roads SQL Server User Group and a Mid-Atlantic PASS Regional Mentor. She is passionate about SQL Server and the SQL Server community, doing anything she can to give back. Monica can always be found on Twitter (@sqlespresso) handing out helpful tips.

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Blog Post

Back up Encryption

Nowadays security breaches happen way to frequently. As DBA’s we should all take extra care with sensitive data and ensure we...

2018-09-11 (first published: )

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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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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...

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Server-Level Table sizes

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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

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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