Analytics Platform System (APS) AU6 released
Better late than never: The Analytics Platform System (APS), which is a renaming of the Parallel Data Warehouse (PDW), released an appliance update...
2017-11-07
1,055 reads
James Serra's Blog
Azure SQL Database Managed Instance
Azure SQL Database Managed Instance is a new flavor of Azure SQL Database that is a game changer. It offers...
2017-10-31
1,196 reads
Microsoft Ignite Big Data Presentations
There were so many good presentations at Microsoft Ignite, all of which can be viewed on-demand. I wanted to list...
2017-10-17
1,485 reads
Use cases of various products for a big data cloud solution
There are a tremendous amount of Microsoft products that are cloud-based for building big data solutions. It’s great that there...
2017-10-11
2,423 reads
What’s new in SQL Server 2017 presentation
I just uploaded a new presentation called “What’s new in SQL Server 2017”. It covers all the new features in...
2017-10-06
745 reads
Microsoft Ignite Announcements
Many product announcements were made this week at Microsoft Ignite, and I wanted to give a quick overview of all...
2017-09-28
959 reads
Distributed Writes
In SQL Server, scaling out reads (i.e. using Active secondary replicas via AlwaysOn Availability Groups) is a lot easier than scaling out...
2017-09-21
742 reads
Azure Archive Blob Storage
Last week Microsoft released a public preview of a new service called Azure Archive Blob Storage, offering customers a lower-cost...
2017-08-31
1,038 reads
Data Virtualization vs Data Warehouse
Data virtualization goes by a lot of different names: logical data warehouse, data federation, virtual database, and decentralized data warehouse....
2017-08-24
913 reads
Microsoft Big Data Certification Exams
I previously blogged about Microsoft certification changes, and since then there have been some new Microsoft Big Data certifications exams released:
Already...
2017-08-08
686 reads
Blogs
A Last Minute Trip to the EU
By Steve Jones
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
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
I’m excited to announce the release of a new open-source project that fully automates...
Forums
Optional Parameter Plan Optimization in SQL Server 2025: Fixing the Kitchen-Sink Search Procedure
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Optional Parameter Plan Optimization in...
AI Experience Gap that we keep talking about
Comments posted to this topic are about the item AI Experience Gap that we...
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) + 1Which of the following queries produces the expected ordering and why? (Select all correct) See possible answers