Technical Article

Improve Your Database Unit Testing Skills and Win Free Stuff

As the SQL Developer community grows to embrace the benefits of test-driven development for databases, so the importance of learning to do it properly increases. One way of learning effective TDD is by the use of code kata – short practice sessions that encourage test-first development in baby steps. I have a limited number of licences for SQL Test to give away free – just for practicing a bit of TDD and telling me about it.

External Article

Webinar: Temporary Tables in Oracle and SQL Server

Once again Jonathan Lewis (Oracle Ace Director, OakTable Network) and Grant Fritchey (Microsoft SQL Server MVP) will host a live discussion on Oracle and SQL Server, this time in relation to temporary tables. Will they agree on some common ground? Or will it be an out and out argument? Either way, be prepared for a lively exchange that will not only entertain, but will teach you key concepts on Oracle and SQL Server.

SQLServerCentral Editorial

Software is Like Building a House

One of the really classic analogies in software is that it's like building a house. You have a foundation, multiple teams, lots of contractors that specialize in something, etc. And it's an analogy that's debated as to its relevance over and over. I won't go into the correctness of this analogy, but I wanted to comment on it.

External Article

Importing Data From Excel Using SSIS - Part 1

Recently while working on a project to import data from an Excel worksheet using SSIS, I realized that sometimes the SSIS Package failed even though when there were no changes in the structure/schema of the Excel worksheet. I investigated it and I noticed that the SSIS Package succeeded for some set of files, but for others it failed. I found that the structure/schema of the worksheet from both these sets of Excel files were the same, the data was the only difference. How come just changing the data can make an SSIS Package fail? What actually causes this failure? What can we do to fix it?

Blogs

A Last Minute Trip to the EU

By

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

By

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

By

I’m excited to announce the release of a new open-source project that fully automates...

Read the latest Blogs

Forums

ORDER BY alias

By aniap

Comments posted to this topic are about the item ORDER BY alias

Optional Parameter Plan Optimization in SQL Server 2025: Fixing the Kitchen-Sink Search Procedure

By vgupta

Comments posted to this topic are about the item Optional Parameter Plan Optimization in...

AI Experience Gap that we keep talking about

By Pat Wright

Comments posted to this topic are about the item AI Experience Gap that we...

Visit the forum

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) + 1
Which of the following queries produces the expected ordering and why? (Select all correct)

See possible answers