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How Safe is Cloud Storage?

As more and more companies look to the cloud for their data storage needs, the same questions are being asked over and over again: if a security breech were to occur, who would be responsible and how much of a guarantee could the provider give us that our data would be safe from prying eyes.

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Joe Celko finds a reference to Conway's Game of Life while clearing out his desk, and is suddenly gripped with nostalgia. It wasn't just flares, mullets and disco, but simple computer games in interpreted basic. Somehow, Conway's Game of Life was too intriguing to be abandoned in the attic. Can it be implemented in SQL? Joe sets up a challenge.

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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