Quick Security Mistakes
Steve reminds you to be careful of taking shortcuts, as these can compromise security. Automation and DevOps might help you avoid mistakes.
2020-01-06
291 reads
Editorials
The Art of Commenting
This week Steve talks about the ways in which comments are important in our code.
2020-01-04
301 reads
The Time to Patch
Microsoft has spent years working on building a reliable and dependable patch process for their software. While some products have had more sporadic updates, SQL Server has moved to a fairly regular schedule. Not quite a predictable "Patch Tuesday" schedule, but you can count on a CU arriving every month or two for SQL Server. […]
2020-01-03
827 reads
2020-01-02
335 reads
2020-01-01
91 reads
Looking Back at the Decade
Today is the last day of 2019, and the last day of the 2010 decade. I'm still somewhat amazed by the fact that we're entering the 2020s and we still don't really have flying cars. We're well past 2001 and 2010, and still not much space exploration, though the growth in computing power and AI/ML […]
2019-12-31
215 reads
2019-12-30
187 reads
The New Year: A Chance to Start Over
January 1st is the beginning of a new year thanks to Julius Caesar and Pope Gregory XIII. This date is somewhat arbitrary, and many religions and cultures celebrate their own beginning of a new year at different times. Even though these celebrations don’t fall at the same time, I think the sentiment is similar. The […]
2019-12-28
156 reads
The Best DBA Gifts
Today Steve asks if there is anything you'd want as a gift that would make your job better.
2019-12-27
304 reads
A Dearth of Data
A new technique developed by Microsoft is designed to help AI/ML models get trained with minimal data.
2019-12-26
179 reads
Blogs
T-SQL Tuesday #202 SQL Server Outage You’ll Never Forget: A Roundup
When I put together the invitation for T-SQL Tuesday #202, I wasn't sure what...
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...
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