Apologies
Hello all! I wanted to apologize to you. I haven’t been keeping up with the blog well at all over the last couple of months. I have simply been...
2021-03-15
31 reads
Webcast Recording – Building a Proper SQL Server DB Security Model
The recording for my presentation on Building a Proper SQL Server DB Security Model is now available. It’s right at an hour long and in it I present a...
2021-03-18 (first published: 2021-03-15)
361 reads
Server Review Essentials for Accidental and Junior DBAs—Client Onboarding (Part 3)
The next post of this series is finally ready to fly. I apologize for the delay between posts, but between the rolling blackouts in Texas during the 2021 Snowpaclypse...
2021-03-18 (first published: 2021-03-15)
331 reads
What’s New in the Block Editor: Edit Your Images, Drag and Drop Blocks and Patterns, and More
Here’s a peek at the latest changes in the block editor, including image editing, draggable blocks and patterns, a new Page List block, and a streamlined panel for managing...
2021-03-15
22 reads
How I tested Parse data transformation in Azure Data Factory
(2021-Mar-15) While watching the first MiB movie with my family, it was quite clear that the character played by Will Smith at first didn’t have a clear idea about what...
2021-03-17 (first published: 2021-03-15)
3,173 reads
Getting SQL Services Information with Powershell
Hopefully you already know everything about your SQL estate, including what services are installed and what’s running them, either because it’s so small you just know, or, preferably, you...
2021-03-15
72 reads
ADF: Error trying to debug pipeline: BadRequest
I made a mistake recently when I was creating an ADF pipeline, annoyingly I made loads of changes and then clicked the debug button, when I pressed debug the...
2021-03-12
27 reads
ADF: Error trying to debug pipeline: BadRequest
I made a mistake recently when I was creating an ADF pipeline, annoyingly I made loads of changes and then clicked the debug button, when I pressed debug the...
2021-03-17 (first published: 2021-03-12)
863 reads
Data dictionary script
I restarted speaking with New Stars of Data today – I gave a talk on Database documentation. Below is the script I created to pull metadata into an excel...
2021-03-16 (first published: 2021-03-12)
722 reads
A Year of COVID-19
At this time last year, I was supposed to be in England. I coached the weekend of Mar 7-9, and was supposed to leave the evening of the 9th...
2021-03-12
25 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