SQLServerCentral Editorial

The Decision to Fail

When a disaster occurs, the response from your organization isn't always pre-determined. There are times when you might not want to failover to secondary systems, especially if you don't expect the disaster to last long. How do you decide when to fail over?

External Article

More Uses for Data Explorer for Excel

Microsoft has introduced a new BI product that will help simplify the data discovery phase for Excel users. “Data Explorer” is an Excel add-in that enhances the self-service Business Intelligence experience in Excel by simplifying data discovery and access. Data Explorer is a preview product so these features may appear differently in the final release.

Technical Article

New Custom Metric: Percentage of blocked connections

This metric reports the number of connections that are currently blocked, divided by the total count of current connections.

Most well-balanced SQL Servers will have some degree of blocking. This metric attempts to measure the impact of lead blocking queries against other queries. Higher values indicate that many connections are being blocked, and queries should be tuned to reduce the amount of contention.

Blogs

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Automated SQL Server Benchmarking with HammerDB and Docker: A Complete Testing Framework

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Server-Level Table sizes

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ORDER BY alias

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Optional Parameter Plan Optimization in SQL Server 2025: Fixing the Kitchen-Sink Search Procedure

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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