Creating a heat map in Reporting Services
Use custom assemblies to generate a heat map matrix in SQL Server Reporting Services
Growing Your SQL Server Skills without Breaking the Bank
Learning more about SQL Server doesn't have to cost a small fortune. If you're willing to invest the time, you can learn.
What's Coming True?
Steve Jones looks forward to the new year and asks in this poll what you think will happen.
High Availability and Disaster Recovery for Small Businesses
Too often in the past, High Availability and Disaster Recovery have been marketed as expensive choices for businesses with deep pockets. The truth is that, with careful planning, there are sensible and economic solutions for small businesses that can maintain business continuity when disaster strikes.
A Beginners Look at Hadoop
Hadoop has been making a lot of noise in the Big Data world. Despite my lack of Linux experience I decided to take the plunge and this is what I found.
Getting Started with HDInsight - Part 3 - Creating an HDInsight Cluster in Microsoft Azure Cloud
In this tip we will look at two different ways of creating an HDInsight Cluster: Creating an HDInsight Cluster through Azure Management Portal, and creating an HDInsight Cluster through Windows Azure PowerShell.
The 2015 Plan
As we look to the new year, Steve Jones wonders what improvements you might be planning for your career.
SQL Server Data Import System to Alert For Missed Imports
In this tip Tim Smith looks at how to set up a system that allows automatic notification if a process doesn't import new data into SQL Server.
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