If you’re going to work with databases, you probably ought to know something about data. In particular, we don’t put data directly into a database; we have to encode it and represent it in a format which a machine can handle.
2025-04-02
Steve has a few thoughts on natural keys, which often turn out not to be as unique as we expect.
2025-03-03
172 reads
Companies of all sizes and across industries are struggling to cope with an explosion of data never before seen in the short history of computing. As applications reach new levels of sophistication and become deeply interconnected, these companies find themselves increasingly overworked, overheated, and at their wits’ end, desperately trying to squeeze just a bit more performance and availability out of their aging database architectures.
2024-10-11
If you’ve ever had a traditional logic course, you’ll have run into “The Law of Identity” as the founding principle of all Western thought. It says that: “To be is to be something in particular; to be nothing in particular or anything in general, is to be nothing at all.”
2024-10-07
All developers hit the problem of how and where to store and set their configuration, profile, or initial data. A long time ago, it was generally decided that simple text files containing key/values were best, stored with the application. After all, you are relying on being able to entice busy people to get the permanent settings right for their requirements, folks who are generally not interested in your elegant computer science constructs. Not only that, but the settings must be parsed very quickly and efficiently, otherwise a process that uses the tool will slow to a crawl.
2024-10-04
Many years ago, my wife and I wrote an article for Datamation, a major trade publication at the time, under the title, “Don’t Warehouse Dirty Data!” It’s been referenced quite a few times over the decades but is nowhere to be found using Google these days. The point is, if you have written a report using data, you have no doubt felt the pain of dirty data and it is nothing new.
2024-09-27
This tip will help you understand what NULL means and different ways to handle NULL values when working with SQL Server data.
2024-07-08
Steve sees that poor database design is the reality of the world and we have to work around that.
2024-06-07
307 reads
Ever wonder all the reasons that we use databases instead of file systems? While we don’t think of it too much anymore, the first reason that databases came into existence was to remove redundancies.
2024-04-12
2023-11-27
6,380 reads
I’m excited to announce the release of a new open-source project that fully automates...
One of my favourite features of SQL Server 2022 was the T-SQL Snapshot Backups....
By Steve Jones
I have said and written this many times: Redgate Software is the type of...
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Optional Parameter Plan Optimization in...
Comments posted to this topic are about the item AI Experience Gap that we...
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