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

Adaptive Joins in SQL Server

SQL Server 2017 (compatibility 140) brought us many Intelligent Query Processing (IQP), formally known as Adaptive Query Processing, features that improve performance on workloads straight out of the box...

2020-09-02

35 reads

Blog Post

Open Letter to PASS

As you know, I spoke to 12 Chapter Leaders and 4 Regional Mentors yesterday. All are very upset with PASS right now and feel slighted, which as a volunteer...

2020-07-03 (first published: )

266 reads

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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

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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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