2021-12-06
337 reads
Editorials
Holiday Fun for Your Career
The Advent of Code is live, and Steve finds it to be a fun way to take a break during your day.
2021-12-04
297 reads
When to Use a Database
While relational developers and administrators might always want to use a database, that might not be the case for those that analyze data. Steve suggests you help them see the value of a database platform.
2021-12-03
513 reads
Building a Production Database
Lessons learned from building a database caught Steve's eye, and he has a few comments.
2021-12-01
624 reads
2021-11-29
207 reads
It's All About the Gratitude
I'm writing this the day after the US holiday of Thanksgiving. Lots of things are said about Thanksgiving, positive, negative, in between. The core concept of the holiday is to take a moment to take stock of what you have. It's a good idea. Every so often, look around and acknowledge, depending on anyone's situation, […]
2021-11-27
110 reads
2021-11-26
203 reads
2021-11-24
268 reads
The Complexity of Modern Systems
Building software is hard, and our systems are very complex these days.
2021-11-22
381 reads
PASS Data Community Summit 2021 Report
The 2021 virtual PASS Data Community Summit was held from November 8th through the 12th. PASS Summit has always been the biggest yearly conference for database professionals, and this year’s virtual conference had over 18,000 individuals registered! If you signed up for the event, you may now stream the sessions on-demand. This is an exclusive […]
2021-11-20
357 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
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