Ysaias Portes

Principal Database Engineer and founder of Forward Thinkers Consulting, a data engineering practice I started in 2010. I work on SQL Server administration, security, high availability, and migrations, plus SSIS ETL and healthcare EDI X12 for payers and health systems.

Before consulting full time I spent 13 years as a senior DBA at a large hospital system, running 80+ SQL Servers with 3,000+ databases and building its first enterprise data warehouse, and four years leading business intelligence at a Medicaid health plan.

I maintain sp_SQLFlightRecorder, an open-source T-SQL diagnostic recorder, and contribute to Ola Hallengren's Maintenance Solution.

Based in Miramar, Florida. forwardthinkersconsulting.com
  • Interests: SQL Server internals, performance tuning, high availability, ETL and data integration, healthcare data and EDI X12, Azure SQL
  • Skills: SQL Server 6.5-2022, T-SQL, performance tuning, AlwaysOn Availability Groups, clustering, replication, disaster recovery, TDE and Always Encrypted, SSIS, SSRS, Azure SQL Database and Managed Instance, Azure DevOps, EDI X12 (834, 835, 837, 270/271, 278), C#, PowerShell

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Question of the Day

Using CHOOSE()

We have this code that sets some status values and then queries them using the CHOOSE() function in SQL Server 2025. 

CREATE TABLE Status
(
    StatusID INT,
    StatusDescription VARCHAR(20)
);
GO
INSERT dbo.Status
(
    StatusID,
    StatusDescription
)
VALUES
(0, 'Uncategorized'),
(1, 'Active'),
(2, 'Inactive'),
(3, 'Temp');

GO
SELECT CHOOSE(StatusID, 'Unknown', 'Active', 'Inactive', 'Temporary')
FROM Status;
When the SELECT runs, what is returned?

See possible answers