Measurements
"If you cannot measure something, you cannot improve it." - Lord Kelvin. That quote and a blog about it inspired today's editorial.
2011-07-07
168 reads
Editorials
We Need a DBA Boot Camp
Today we have a guest editorial from Andy Warren. We often find that many DBAs fall into the job as accidental DBAs, and need more training. Is a boot camp the way to get them up to speed quickly?
2011-07-06
249 reads
How Much Is It Worth?
This editorial was originally published on Nov 21, 2005. It is being re-run today as Steve is on holiday. How much money is it worth to compromise your ethics? Steve Jones asks today as many companies around the world seem to be doing that.
2011-07-05
135 reads
Cloud Barriers
I'd like to hear the thoughts of DBAs out there on Windows and SQL Azure, and the prospects of moving applications and databases into the clouds. How many DBAs work for companies that have done it or are seriously considering it? What are the deepest concerns?
2011-07-04
106 reads
Independence Day 2011
A holiday in the US has most people away from work. Steve Jones leaves you a few thoughts and humor from his vacation.
2011-07-04
87 reads
Sabbaticals
This editorial was originally published on Oct 25, 2005. Steve Jones talks about the idea of a sabbatical from work and the problems that might ensue if you haven't properly planned it.
2011-07-01
100 reads
A Little Interviewing Advice
This editorial was originally published on October 20, 2005. It is being reprinted as Steve is on vacation. I know there was a great uproar over the interview piece at the beginning of this week and I received lots of opinions on various parts of the article, good and bad to go over. But one […]
2011-06-30
352 reads
Changing the Oil In Your Server
Today we have a guest editorial from Andy Warren. We have regular maintenance that needs to be performed on our cars, and also regular maintenance that needs to be done on our servers. Andy points out that companies need to understand this and make sure these regular activities are performed.
2011-06-29
248 reads
Cost of the Cloud
The cloud should bring with it lower costs, and better efficiency, but that's not necessarily the way things are. Microsoft has a great internal project that costs out the cloud for their departments, and this would be a great addition to the public or private clouds.
2011-06-27
178 reads
Where Do You Go for Authoritative SQL Server Best Practices?
There is now a vast amount of SQL Server information and 'best practice' advice available on the Internet, in the form of innumerable blogs, community sites and forums. Finding an answer to your question is relatively easy, but finding the right, or best, answer is harder than ever.
2011-06-27
485 reads
Blogs
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...
T-SQL Snapshot Backups on Availability Group Secondary Replicas
One of my favourite features of SQL Server 2022 was the T-SQL Snapshot Backups....
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