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Continuous Delivery and the Database

Continuous Delivery is fairly generally understood to be an effective way of tackling the problems of software delivery and deployment by making build, integration and delivery into a routine. Phil Factor explains why he's an enthusiast for databases being full participants in this story, and suggests practical ways of doing so.

Stairway to T-SQL Beyond The Basics

Stairway to T-SQL: Beyond The Basics Level 7: Controlling the Flow of Your T-SQL

When you are writing TSQL code there are times when you want to perform the same logic over and over again. To accomplish this you can used the WHILE keyword. There are other times when you want to perform a conditional test and depending on the results of the test you execute one code block for the TRUE condition and possibly a different code block when the condition is FALSE. When you need to conditionally execute code based on the outcome of a condition you can used the IF keyword. In this Stairway level I will be discussing how to use the WHILE and IF constructs to control the flow of your TSQL code.

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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