Making Software Decisions
The process of building software for others involves lots of decisions. Ensuring that you are making good decisions can impact how others view your final product.
2021-09-27
197 reads
Editorials
Volunteer For Something
I spent a chunk of the day yesterday, after work, but before working on a new book (yeah, I've got two jobs now), playing with my radios. I was programming the digital one to get it to use my Raspberry Pi as a hotspot (it used to work, now it doesn't). I also spent some […]
2021-09-25
230 reads
Thank a Mentor
There is almost always someone that helps us in our career with mentorship. Today Steve suggests you thank them.
2021-09-24
84 reads
To Inifinity and Beyond With 1=1
There is some code that might work, but could lead others astray in the future. Today Steve notes that we ought to write code that sets a good example, and a loop that potentially runs forever isn't that type of code.
2021-09-22
303 reads
Poor Work Management
The future of work is uncertain, but not everyone is ready for remote work to continue.
2021-09-20
303 reads
All the Tools in Your Toolbox
I recently began writing an article to compare the performance of several window functions to traditional query methods. I began with my favorite function, LAG, but soon found that there were so many other ways to write the query that the article never covered the additional window functions. The article was quite fun to write, […]
2021-09-18
216 reads
2021-09-17
218 reads
Help Your Manager
Your manager doesn't always know what you're doing, and rarely knows what you've done. That's your job.
2021-09-15
213 reads
Unix vs PowerShell
I saw an article on using awk, sed, and grep on Linux. I used to know how to use those, though I was by no means an expert. However, working with a stream of text with an input and output was a valuable skill I've used over and over in my career. There are plenty […]
2021-09-13
286 reads
The State of Data Growth
Data continues to grow at incredible rates. That's good for those of us that make a living with data.
2021-09-11
284 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