How Normal Is Your World?
Steve thinks the world is close to normal for him after the pandemic. What about you?
2023-03-10
169 reads
Editorials
Has Everyone Had a Data Breach?
Not only is the security of our organization important, but that of our partners matters as well.
2023-03-08
143 reads
Nested Transactions
Steve Jones notes there aren't really nested transactions in SQL Server. And we all ought to know this.
2023-03-06
1,645 reads
The Top SQL Server Engine Errors
The SQL Server Support team published the top errors they see in calls. Steve has a few comments on what they're doing to help customers.
2023-03-04
641 reads
The Struggles to Keep Up with Growing Systems
The growing complexity of environments can cause struggles for many IT professionals. However, we need to ensure we are not making things worse.
2023-03-03
168 reads
Stale Data Causes Security Issues
Stale data from Microsoft has led to many systems being more vulnerable than they should have been. There's no excuse for this, from Microsoft or our own organizations.
2023-03-01
127 reads
Will ChatGPT Write Our Queries?
ChatGPT is in a lot of media as an artificial intelligence program that might change the world. Will it change the world for developers?
2023-02-27
636 reads
Consider Sharing Your Knowledge At User Groups and Conferences
The first time I spoke in front of a group of people over 20 years ago about a programming topic, I was scared to death. I could barely sleep the night before, obsessing about the material and practicing it repeatedly. When I finally did sleep, it felt like minutes before I awoke, and it was […]
2023-02-25
119 reads
The Top 5 Technologists
There's a common party question about which 5 people would you invite to a dinner party? Often this is amended to include living or dead people, and it's often interesting to hear people tell you who they'd invite and why. Since most of the people reading this work in technology in some way, I was […]
2023-02-24
189 reads
The Danger of Sharing Data
When a company assembles a lot of data to draw conclusions, that's great. However, when that one company sells data to a number of competitors, that can be a problem.
2023-02-22
192 reads
Blogs
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....
The Book of Redgate: Hours
By Steve Jones
I have said and written this many times: Redgate Software is the type of...
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