SQLBalls

Bradley Ball is a Sr. Azure FastTrack Customer Engineer for Microsoft, and former Data Platform MVP. During his IT career Bradley has spent 8 years working as a Defense contractor for clients such as the U.S. Army, The Executive Office of the President of the United States for the Obama Administration, and is the former Data Platform Practice Manager for Pragmatic Works Consulting, now 3Cloud. He has presented at SQL Saturdays, SSUG's, SQL Rally, DevConnections, SQLBits, SQL Live 360, and the PASS Summit. Bradley co-hosts the Tales From The Field YouTube show https://aka.ms/TftF/youtube , he can also be found blogging on https://www.SQLBalls.com

Twitter: @sqlballs
Website: https://www.sqlballs.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sqlballs

PASS Summit 2013 Deck and Demos Live

by SQLBalls

SQLBalls

Ready to rock some Internals.Hello Dear Reader! This is just a quick blog to say that my Deck and Demo's...

2013-10-18

820 reads

PASS Summit 2013 Keynotes Day 2

by SQLBalls

SQLBalls

Okay Dear Reader one more time let me say that if you are interested in Hekaton In-Memory OLTP Then you...

2013-10-17

1,051 reads

PASS 2013 Keynotes Live Day 1

by SQLBalls

SQLBalls

Final thoughts Dear Reader. This is a big launch year for Microsoft and we are getting some very cool toys...

2013-10-16

721 reads

DevConnections Deck & Demos Live!

by SQLBalls

SQLBalls

Hello Dear Reader! Just a quick blog today. The Deck and Demo’s for my Presentations today at SQL DevConnections are...

2013-10-02

524 reads

Can You Compress a Temp Table?

by SQLBalls

SQLBalls

Hello Dear Reader! We are finishing up the final day of the Performance Tuning Workshop here in Atlanta and I...

2013-09-26 (first published: 2013-09-24)

7,539 reads

Performance Tuning In LA!

by SQLBalls

SQLBalls

Hello Dear Reader! This year Pragmatic Works has brought our Performance Tuning Workshop to Chicago, Boston, and Atlanta. Due to...

2013-09-26

544 reads

SQL 2014 SSMS is Killing my C:

by SQLBalls

SQLBalls

I could hear SQL saying to my C: Drive "Why You Little...." Hello Dear Reader!

The Blog about SQL Saturday 232 coming...

2013-09-17

1,102 reads

T-SQL Tuesday #46 Rube Goldberg Machine aka Automating Deleting Older Certificates

by SQLBalls

SQLBalls

Hello Dear Reader! This is the second Tuesday of the month and you know what that means, T-SQL Tuesday the...

2013-09-12 (first published: 2013-09-10)

1,767 reads

24 Hours of PASS Q & A: Why are Bit’s Flipped?

by SQLBalls

SQLBalls

http://bit.ly/16UyEPHHello Dear Reader. Almost two weeks ago I delivered a presentation for the 24 Hours of PASS on SQL Server...

2013-08-16

947 reads

The Man Who Thinks He Can

by SQLBalls

SQLBalls

Hello Dear Reader! I got a lot of great questions during the 24 Hours of PASS last week and I'm...

2013-08-09

840 reads

Blogs

Announcements from the Microsoft Fabric Community Conference — Barcelona 2026

Microsoft shared a broad set of Fabric, Power BI, and SQL updates at FabCon...

Au Revoir for now

No, I’m not quitting or retiring. Just going on vacation, but I leave tonight...

Goodbye, Microsoft

By Randolph West

A few years ago I took a new job at Microsoft, working as a...

Read the latest Blogs

Forums

Let's Talk Certifications

By Grant Fritchey

Comments posted to this topic are about the item Let's Talk Certifications, which is...

Force join by longest possible choice

Title pretty much says it. I want to join to a table that has...

Building a SQL Server Fleet Audit That Leadership Actually Reads

By Mayank Sethi

Comments posted to this topic are about the item Building a SQL Server Fleet...

Visit the forum

Question of the Day

The Empty Aggregate

I have this table in a SQL Server 2025 database:

CREATE TABLE [dbo].[CustomerOrder]
(
[OrderID] [int] NULL,
[CustomerID] [int] NULL,
[total] [money] NULL
) ON [PRIMARY]
GO

What is returned from this code? (answers are for the sum and then the count)

SELECT SUM(total) AS sum,
       COUNT(total) AS count
FROM dbo.CustomerOrder;

See possible answers