The Third Sabbatical
I can’t believe I’ve been at Redgate long enough to get a third sabbatical. I’ve very lucky to have this job, still enjoy it, and get the benefit. I’ve...
2025-06-13
9 reads
The Voice of the DBA
Advice I Like: Focus on what’s important
Don’t let someone else’s urgency becomes your emergency. In fact, don’t be governed by the urgent of any sort. Focus on the important. The urgent is a tyrant. –...
2025-06-27 (first published: 2025-06-13)
454 reads
Modifying a Trigger to Capture More Info: #SQLNewBlogger
I had someone ask me about using triggers to detect changes in their tables. This is a second post looking at triggers, in this case, modifying my trigger to...
2025-06-11
82 reads
T-SQL Tuesday #187–Solving Problems
This month we have a great invite from Joe Fleming, a first time host of T-SQL Tuesday. Joe reached out when I requested some hosts and I’m glad he...
2025-06-10
109 reads
Monday Monitor Tips: Customizing Data Retention
One of the biggest challenges with monitoring data is managing the volume over time. Lots of bespoke/home-grown solutions don’t do this well, and some commercial products have a gross...
2025-06-09
40 reads
The Book of Redgate: Ingeniously Simple
Redgate has been known for many useful tools that are easy to use. We’ve tried to do that in all our point tools. We talk about simplicity all the...
2025-06-13 (first published: 2025-06-06)
293 reads
A Basic Update Trigger: #SQLNewBlogger
I had someone ask me about using triggers to detect changes in their tables. As I explained a few things, I thought this would make a nice series, so...
2025-06-04
84 reads
Getting References for GenAI Results
I wrote an editorial on the view of GenAI tech from execs and someone commented that they wanted references for results. Most of us might take a result from...
2025-06-02
43 reads
Copilot Outside of SSMS Seems to Work
I read Brent’s first look at SSMS and Copilot in there. He didn’t have a great opinion of the tool, especially comparing it to Gemini or Claude. I haven’t...
2025-05-30
115 reads
A New Word: Falesia
falesia– n. the disquieting awareness that someone’s importance to you and your importance to them may not necessarily match – that your best friend might only think of you...
2025-05-30
31 reads
Blogs
T-SQL Tuesday #202 SQL Server Outage You’ll Never Forget: A Roundup
When I put together the invitation for T-SQL Tuesday #202, I wasn't sure what...
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...
Forums
Server-Level Table sizes
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Server-Level Table sizes
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...
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