Should your Source Control System understand your code?
Phil Factor ponders why improvements to source control and versioning so often lag behind the pace of progress in development as a whole.
PowerShell One-Liners: Collections, Hashtables, Arrays and Strings
The way to learn PowerShell is to browse and nibble, rather than to sit down to a formal five-course meal. In his continuing series on PowerShell one-liners, Michael Sorens provides Fast Food for busy professionals who want results quickly and aren't too faddy. Part 3 has as its tasty confections - Collections, Hashtables, arrays and strings.
Report Builder or Reporting Services?
Should you be using Report Builder 3.0 or SQL Server Reporting Services 2008 R2 to build reports? Here's the 411!
Microsoft Azure Storage Queues Part 1: Getting Started
Microsoft Azure Queues are a ready-to-use service that loosely connects components or applications through the cloud. This article is the first part in a five-part series about Microsoft Azure Cloud Services by Roman Schacherl.
DAX Relationships
Learn how relationships work in Powerpivot workbooks and how you can build them using the DAX language.
No Works of Art
Manual deployments and configuration of software is akin to creating works of art. Not exactly what Steve Jones would like to see if we are to practice software engineering.
Branching and Merging: Ten Pretty-Good Practices
After experiencing 'merge misery' personally, Konrad Lukasik came up with 10 well-tested ways of making branches and merges a stress-free part of application development.
Stairway to SQLCLR Level 3: Security (General and SAFE Assemblies)
In the third level of our Stairway to SQLCLR, we look at the various mechanisms in place to help us control Security. In this Level we will focus on SAFE mode and see how secure SQLCLR is by default.
Blogs
A Last Minute Trip to the EU
By Steve Jones
My life has some crazy travel stretches for sure. Between speaking, office visits, customer...
Part 3 of 3: Tuning DiskANN — R, Alpha, L, Beam Width, Recall and Latency
In Part 1, we saw how ‘Vamana’ represents vectors as nodes, connects them with...
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...
Forums
Server-Level Table sizes
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Server-Level Table sizes
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...
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