SQL Server 2012 (“Denali”): AlwaysOn
AlwaysOn is a new integrated high availability (HA) and disaster recovery (DR) solution that provides redundancy within a datacenter and across datacenters...
2011-12-21
1,579 reads
James Serra's Blog
Junk dimensions
Junk dimensions are dimensions that contain miscellaneous data such as flags and indicators. When designing a data warehouse, you might...
2011-12-19
1,383 reads
Factless fact table
A factless fact table is a fact table that does not have any measures. It is essentially an intersection of...
2011-12-16
2,646 reads
TechNet Virtual Labs
There is an excellent site called TechNet Virtual Labs that enables you to quickly and easily evaluate Microsoft’s newest products and...
2011-12-14
1,084 reads
Top SSAS white papers
These are my favorite SSAS white papers released by Microsoft, with many from SQLCAT. I’ll keep this post updated with new...
2011-12-12
5,709 reads
Reduce heap table fragmentation
A table that does not have a clustered index is referred to as a Heap. While a lot has been...
2011-12-09
7,169 reads
Create SQL Server scripts with Visio 2010
If you are using Visio 2010 and creating tables via the Database Model Diagram template, you may be surprised to...
2011-12-07
2,333 reads
SQL Server 2012 Developer Training Kit
The SQL Server 2012 Developer Training Kit has been updated with a bunch of new content (download it here). This...
2011-12-05
1,131 reads
SQL Server 2012 (“Denali”) Licensing
Microsoft has posted the licensing for SQL Server 2012. It has simplified licensing: SQL Server 2012 will offer two licensing...
2011-12-02
1,511 reads
Buffer Size in SSIS
Behind the scenes in SSIS, the data flow engine uses a buffer-oriented architecture to efficiently load and manipulate datasets in...
2011-11-30
16,635 reads
Blogs
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...
T-SQL Snapshot Backups on Availability Group Secondary Replicas
One of my favourite features of SQL Server 2022 was the T-SQL Snapshot Backups....
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