Runbooks in SQL Azure
SQL Azure Runbooks promise to be your “SQL Server Agent in the cloud” enabling automation of time consuming, repetitive tasks.
The Value of Code
What's the value of code to your organization? Steve Jones thinks it's much larger than many people believe.
Facebooking Up to Your Social Responsibilities
Phil Factor argues that as terrorists and criminals exploit the new opportunities that open up as technology develops, technologists must work with Governments to ensure thoughtful custodianship of data, and sensitivity towards legitimate privacy.
Your Best Work
Interviewing people is hard to do well. Steve Jones talks about a technique that might help you better choose good employees for your organization.
Using Stored Procedures to Provide an Application’s Business-Logic Layer
When faced with a complex business application, Dwain's team chose to encapsulate and implement most of an application’s business logic in SQL Server, using an interface made up of stored procedures. Here's how they did it.
Personal Development
Steve Jones thinks that a personal development plan is important and talks today a little about how you should build one.
Guidelines for Using Natively-Compiled Stored Procedures in SSIS Packages
As you may know, SQL Server In-Memory OLTP introduced in SQL Server 2014 offers great performance improvements for ETL processes. In this tip we cover techniques you need to know about various behaviors of SQL Server In-Memory OLTP depending on the options you select.
Minimal Meetings
Too many meetings happen in software teams. Steve Jones says that when scheduling meeting, you should be aware of the cost, and only include those people that need to be there.
Templates and teamwork
SQL Server expert David Poole discusses how teams can work together and share templates in Management Studio.
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