The Battlefield of Your Career
If you want to actively manage your career and drive it forward, Steve has some advice.
2022-02-14
190 reads
Editorials
Joining a Community
In the last week I've been actively trying to join the PostgreSQL community. It's been an interesting experience. I suspect it's going to stay interesting for a while. As part of what I'm doing, I saw this excellent video from Ryan Booz, talking about joining a new community. It got me to thinking. You have […]
2022-02-12
77 reads
Do You Still Use CHAR?
When designing a database, choosing good datatypes is important, but not necessarily all the time. Today Steve wonders if you still use fixed sting data types.
2022-02-11
238 reads
The Cloud as a Foundation
The innovations and possibilities of cloud computing are exciting to Steve.
2022-02-09
174 reads
Speedy Break Fix
Is DevOps and Agile better than waterfall? Steve has a few thoughts after a recent experience.
2022-02-07
252 reads
Please include your DDL
I haven’t done it much the past few years, but I would answer some programming questions posted in forums back in the day. In the late 90s, I answered Visual Basic questions and eventually switched to SQL Server questions here on SQL Server Central as my career progressed. Answering questions not only assisted someone else, […]
2022-02-05
145 reads
The Great Developer Resignation
In 2021, many companies had employees leave positions. The number of people resigning from their jobs was so high that the term "The Great Resignation" began appearing in many publications. A number of industries were affected, and there are no shortage of pundits and experts analyzing why. This happened primarily in the US, but the […]
2022-02-04
274 reads
Think Marathon, not Sprint
DevOps is a journey, not a project. Today Steve reminds us that while we want to work across time and constantly improve, we also need some urgency. A marathon is the balance.
2022-02-02
155 reads
Making Video Chat Better
Video chat is how many of us see our colleagues every week. It's not a great system, but maybe it can get better.
2022-01-31
101 reads
Model Good Behavior
I'm answering a question in the forums and I spot something that crawls up my spine: ;WITH... The person was using a Common Table Expression (CTE) which requires that the preceding statement in the batch have a statement terminator, the semi-colon. However, since the terminator isn't required everywhere, lots of people don't use it at […]
2022-01-29
148 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