SQL Bits XI
The popular UK conference heads to Nottingham from May 2-4, 2013. Both Grant Fritchey and Steve Jones will be speaking, along with lots of talented SQL Server professionals. Register today.
Deleting large number of rows from a table in a VLDB
For enterprise systems, purging data is a reality. Today, we will see some strategies that I recently implemented to make this process work efficiently.
Brent Ozar's Six Scary SQL Surprises
In lesson 3 of the Top 5 Hard-earned Lessons of a DBA series, Brent Ozar exposes six common but scary surprises that can lurk behind the façade of SSMS. Read it now, and learn hard lessons the easy way.
Using the SQL Server MERGE Statement to Process Type 2 Slowly Changing Dimensions
The MERGE statement is powerful and multifunctional, yet it can be hard to master. SOmetimes the MERGE statement that just doesn't do what it's needed to do, like process a Type 2 slowly-changing dimension. Check out this tip to learn more.
Data Insecurity: A Perspective on Data Encryption
The focus of this paper is on the protection of PII data stored within a database using encryption technologies.
Productivity and Accountability
The recent decision by Yahoo to end telecommuting elicits some comments from Steve Jones on the topic of remote work.
Securing SQL Server: Vulnerabilities You Might Not Have Considered
A short look at the vulnerabilities your data may be susceptible to outside of the database tables.
A SQL-Based Universal Currency Formatter
SQL Server isn't usually the best place to format dates or currency as strings. It can be a complex task to conform correctly with national and cultural conventions. Just occasionally, though, you need to do it. This is easy in SQL Server 2012, but if you aren't using that, what do you do?
Two Plugs Away
The culture and practices at Valve are interesting to Steve Jones, but the desks really caught his eye.
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