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Swallowing the Camel

There is a paradox in the nature of the abstractions that many developers want when dealing with databases. They will strain at the gnat, but swallow a camel (Matthew 23:24). Whereas they will recoil with horror when a DBA suggests that an abstraction layer based on views, functions and procedures in a separate database schema […]

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Survey: Using Online Accounts

Using online accounts for license management has some advantages, Red Gate is researching how to implement this for our tools in a way that improves the experience for all involved. To say thank you for your participation, there's a chance to win a $25 Amazon certificate.

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Continuous Integration and automatic builds are fantastic tools for software teams, but only if developers take responsibility for their code. Karsten Kempe explains how to use Team Foundation Server to drive better continuous integration, and walks through a simple open-source tool he built to make nightly builds more transparent, and more valuable.

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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