The Next Evolution of Big Blue
IBM is breaking up and Steve thinks back about the evolution of the company and where they might go from here.
2020-10-27
119 reads
Editorials
SQL Server Phone Home
SQL Server shares some data with Microsoft, but the use is documented. Steve sees this as a model for how companies might share information.
2020-10-26
263 reads
What's Causing the Pushback with DevOps?
The term DevOps gets horribly abused. Don’t get me started on all the weird additions to it like DevSecOps. No, I just mean the term itself gets beaten up quite a lot. It’s to the point where people are starting to shy away from talking about it. I’ve even changed my approach when discussing DevOps […]
2020-10-24
174 reads
Your Technology Budget
How much do you love technology? Is this reflected in a budget? Let us know this week.
2020-10-23 (first published: 2016-10-21)
155 reads
Conflict in Functional Teams
Today we have a guest editorial from Alice Smith as Steve is away. Conflict can be good in a highly functional team, as noted today from the manager of the publishing group at Redgate Software.
2020-10-22 (first published: 2016-10-13)
210 reads
The New Data Warehouse Choice
Steve Jones looks a little more closely at the Azure SQL Data Warehouse, perhaps a viable choice for many of us.
2020-10-21 (first published: 2016-07-14)
281 reads
Clownpocalypse and DR
Today we have a guest editorial as Steve is out of town at the PASS Summit. Grant looks at disasters and being prepared.
2020-10-20 (first published: 2016-10-24)
244 reads
Responding to the Call of the Wild
Phil Factor's manual for taming machines, applications, and other wild beasts.
2020-10-17
159 reads
Career Goals and Inspiration
Steve asks what you might want to achieve or accomplish in your career.
2020-10-16
247 reads
2020-10-13
195 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
Server-Level Table sizes
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Server-Level Table sizes
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...
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