Technical Article

A Few Cool Things You Can Identify Using the Default Trace

If you are running an instance of SQL Server 2005 and above then most likely that instance is running the default trace. This default trace is a canned Profiler server side trace that automatically starts up when SQL Server starts. In this article Greg Larsen explains more about the default trace and shows you how to glean some event information from the trace files created by this background trace process.

External Article

Using Friendly Names for SQL Servers via DNS

Wouldn't it be great if your HR folks only had to put in HR-SQL.mydomain.com for the database connection in their reports? They wouldn't have to remember it was on server Nile and they certainly wouldn't have to change their reports if you migrated their database from the Nile server to the server named Danube. In DNS there are two easy ways to do this.

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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