My Time is Valuable
Spending time on low value tasks isn't often worth the cost for highly paid employees.
2021-03-18
238 reads
Editorials
Every IT Organization is a Snowflake
Some people think every IT department is unique. While that might be literally true, Steve doesn't think that is actually the case.
2021-03-17
226 reads
Take Care of People
The transformation of a way of working is hard, but it's important to realize this is more than just technology. This also includes people.
2021-03-16
101 reads
2021-03-15
161 reads
New Options for Training and Learning
In 2008, I managed to achieve the goal of becoming a Microsoft Certified Trainer. Once I achieved the status, Microsoft shipped me a binder with dozens of DVDs containing lab VMs and class materials for all the current classes. At some point, instead of receiving DVDs, you were expected to download images which was quite […]
2021-03-13
177 reads
Imposter or Student
We all need to learn and tackle new technology in our career. When we do so, are we impostors or students?
2021-03-12
151 reads
2021-03-11
119 reads
The Ease of Containers
Containers have changed how to develop and deploy software. They haven't caught on with databases as much, but Steve thinks this will change.
2021-03-10
156 reads
Distributed SQL Databases
There are new platforms out there that promise a distributed SQL relational database. Steve talks about a few today.
2021-03-09
438 reads
Disclosing the How
As we use more Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning tools in our applications, we need to understand how they work.
2021-03-08
108 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