Capturing My Own Metrics: #SQLNewBlogger
A customer was trying to compare two tables and capture a state as a performance metric. In this case, they were wanting to use Redgate Monitor and custom metrics,...
2026-07-08
431 reads
The Voice of the DBA
T-SQL Tuesday #200: When I Look at a Query …
This month is a milestone for T-SQL Tuesday. It’s number 200, which doesn’t sound big, but this is a monthly party (started by Adam Machanic). We have 12 blog...
2026-07-07
43 reads
A Spread of Vacation
I’m off on vacation today. Which is a little weird as I just got back from a week long vacation in May, cruising with my family. Usually my trips...
2026-07-03
31 reads
AI Helps Me with My Sloppiness
I type fairly well. Well, I type fast, but I do wear out a backspace key relatively quickly on most keyboards. That and a space bar. AI helps me...
2026-07-01
45 reads
Monday Monitor Tips: Virtual Machine Usage and Cost
One of the things I’ve been requesting for a number of years is cost information. I could see this coming in 2015 with the move to the cloud and...
2026-07-13 (first published: 2026-06-29)
219 reads
Advice I Like: Respect
“Don’t aim to have others like you; aim to have them respect you.” – from Excellent Advice for Living This is an interesting piece of advice. It’s easy to...
2026-06-26
101 reads
Prime Day Recommendations
It’s Prime Day. A few of my recommendations, since I want to do some shopping myself (yes, these are commissioned referrals). These are things I’ve ordered and used this...
2026-06-24 (first published: 2026-06-23)
47 reads
A Career of Memories
Annabel retired from Redgate Software this week. Across most of my career at Redgate, I’ve participated in many events, some we hosted, some we sponsored. At most of these...
2026-07-03 (first published: 2026-06-19)
254 reads
No Shortcuts for the SQLCMD Batch Terminator: #SQLNewBlogger
I was messing around with SQLCMD and I realized something I hadn’t known. I’ve never tried it, but the batch separator has to be separate, which I’ll show. Another...
2026-07-08 (first published: 2026-06-17)
303 reads
AI Experiments: Parsing Payment Memos
As part of my running the SQL Saturday charitable foundation, I get sponsorship money from vendors. Primarily Microsoft and AMD, but I hope to change that in the future....
2026-06-15
33 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
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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