Do as I say, not as I do
Steve wishes that Microsoft would follow some of their own advice on SQL Server development in their other software.
2021-08-04
272 reads
Editorials
Interconnected Temp Files
Links between systems can become a problem if an issue in one system affects the others.
2021-08-02
300 reads
Deploying SQL Server Automatically
I've had to install SQL Server many times over the years. Often it has felt that most of these installs were one-offs, a dev server, a new QA instance, a production server for a brand new application. A few times I've had to recover from disaster, including restoring master, but often, I just installed SQL […]
2021-07-31
485 reads
Your MTTR
There are a lot of metrics you can track and many ways to use them to improve how you build and manage software. Steve has a few thoughts on MTTR and similar metrics.
2021-07-30
349 reads
Leading without Managing
Learning to lead is a valued skill to have, and you can do this no matter what your role. You don't need to be a manager to become a leader.
2021-07-28
294 reads
Do You Have ALL the YAML?
There are lots of data exchange formats, and one of them that has become popular is YAML. However, are you sure you have the entire file?
2021-07-26
1,416 reads
Define All The Steps Up Front
After 23 years in one place, I'm pulling up stakes and moving. We're selling our house in one state in the US and we're buying a house in another state about half a continent away. To say it's a stressful and exhausting process is an understatement. The worst part is that no one has defined […]
2021-07-24
210 reads
How Often Do You Patch?
Patching is a chore that any system administrator needs to deal with. As SQL Server 2016 moves out of mainstream support, Steve asks if you have a plan and how often you ensure systems are patched.
2021-07-23
279 reads
The Danger of Management Access
First we had the Solarwinds hack, and now we have a Kaseya ransomware epidemic. It seems the criminals are moving up the stack. We used to see physical attacks on tapes and keyboards, then we saw OS level attacks. Now we seem to be getting to the management layer for software that is used to […]
2021-07-21
307 reads
Seriously Real Time Data Processing
Autonomous cars provide a great environment for large scale, real-time data processing.
2021-07-19
426 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