To-do list: good, bad or indifferent?
Using a list to keep track of what you should work on is only as good as the plan or goal behind it.
2021-10-15 (first published: 2017-08-07)
265 reads
Editorials
The Digital Twin
GE is using lots of data, and machine learning to predict when specific systems will fail by nurturing digital twins.
2021-10-13 (first published: 2017-07-19)
201 reads
2021-10-11 (first published: 2017-07-27)
214 reads
PASS Data Community Summit Pre-cons
This year PASS Data Community Summit is a free virtual event, and I encourage you to register even if you are interested in just a handful of sessions. One of the Learning Pathways might be just what you are looking for, from Query Basics to Power BI to DevOps. What I’m most excited about this […]
2021-10-09
126 reads
The Last SQL Server Service Pack
SQL Server 2016 SP3, the last service pack ever is out. Steve comments on how the world of software patches has changed.
2021-10-08
556 reads
Choosing State Over Migrations
Steve notes that there are differences between state based development and migration based development, but neither is necessarily better.
2021-10-06
436 reads
Location Data Is Not Anonymous
The world of public data is scary for Steve, even when the data is aggregated. It appears that keeping information private is becoming harder, and perhaps, impossible.
2021-10-04
168 reads
What Do You Want to Know Before Negotiating Salary?
It's almost time for Brent Ozar's annual salary survey. Steve reminds you that you can influence the questions, but more importantly, take the survey and provide data for all of us.
2021-10-02
327 reads
Do You Have a Talent Gap?
Many organizations are struggling to hire staff these days. In addition, it seems that many technology groups feel they can't find staff with the right skills.
2021-10-01
292 reads
Incident Review
After an outage, how do you respond to the issue in the future? A good review of the incident should be a learning opportunity.
2021-09-29
153 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