SQLServerCentral Article

Static Code Analysis: a necessary irritation.

There is little doubt that static code analysis can contribute to code quality and deliverability. As an aid to a developer, it seems increasingly essential, but can it ever deliver reliable metrics of code-quality? One shudders at the potential misuse of quality metrics in the wrong hands. My hope is that it remains just an aid to human judgement; and creativity.

External Article

SQL Monitor Custom Metric: WriteLog Wait Time

During a transaction, data is written to the log cache so that it’s ready to be written to the log file on commit, or can be rolled back if necessary. When the log cache is being flushed to disk, the SQL Server session will wait on the WriteLog wait type. If this happens all the time, it may suggest disk bottlenecks where the transaction log is stored.

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Why Put Your Database into Source Control?

Checking program code into source control is a daily ritual for most developers, but versioning database code is less well-understood. Grant Fritchey argues that getting your databases under source control is not only vital for the stability of development and deployment, but it will make your life easier when something does go wrong.

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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