The Bit Bucket

Sometimes I’m sent books to review and I just don’t get around to it fast enough. This book was one of those. Why we argue and how to stop: A Therapist’s Guide to Navigating Disagreements, Managing Emotions, and Creating Healthier Relationships by Jerry Manney .

I found this book quite interesting.

Early on, Jerry notes that journaling is important because memory is unreliable. Jerry said I learned a long time ago that one of the key characteristics of a knowledgeable and successful person is not how much they can remember, but whether they have a method or system for accessing important and relevant information when they need it. I’m certainly learning that more as I get older.

2025-07-13

I often see people doing very repetitive editing tasks that could easily be carried out by using selecting and changing rectangular regions of code.

The simplest example of doing this is to insert some text on a number of rows. Take the following code as an example:

I’ve got the skeleton of a list of columns in a CREATE TABLE statement but let’s assume that I’m a comma in front person and want to put a few spaces and a comma, etc. in front of each column after the second.

2025-07-12

This is a post in the SQL Interview series. These aren’t trick or gotcha questions, they’re just questions designed to scope out a candidate’s knowledge around SQL Server and Azure SQL Database.

Section: Development Level: Intro

Question:

You have a table of transactions. You need to select all the transactions for a particular date, based on the TransactionDateTime column. It holds datetime data type value. The date is stored in the @RequiredDate variable.

2025-07-11

A request that I hear all the time, is “I don’t like tabs but insert name of annoying colleague here decided he likes to use them. How do I remove them?” Similar thing happens when installing SSMS and leaving the default options.

Tabs vs Spaces

Whether to use tabs or spaces leads to near religious level arguments amongst SQL developers. I see strong arguments on both sides. In the past, I’ve always ended up using spaces because I’ve run into issues with tabs in some of the tooling that I needed to use.

2025-07-10

One of the things many people don’t know about me, is that I spent many years both playing and umpiring baseball. Clearly that’s not so common for Australians.

In many ways, the umpiring was probably the most interesting. I’ve umpired up to state level games, including the Pan Pacific games. It certainly teaches you how to deal with strong views effectively.

Most people have seen the classic images of managers/coaches racing out to have a very heated discussion with an umpire. I’ve had so many people asking me how I dealt with that when I was umpiring.

2025-07-09

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2025-07-09

Intellisense is one of the best things that’s ever been added to Visual Studio or to SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS). It’s hard to remember back to before it was added, or how we worked then.

I had a young friend from the United Kingdom who had just completed a Computer Science degree and one of the things that he was most proud of, is that he knew so many HTML tags and which attributes went with which tags. When I showed him HTML Intellisense in Visual Studio, I think he was about to cry.

2025-07-08

This is a post in the SQL Interview series. These aren’t trick or gotcha questions, they’re just questions designed to scope out a candidate’s knowledge around SQL Server and Azure SQL Database.

Section: Administration Level: Medium

Question:

You are reviewing database settings for a server.

You notice that one database has AUTO_CLOSE configured. Your model database does not have it enabled.

What is the most likely cause for that setting to be enabled, and what effect does enabling it have?

2025-07-07

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Ask Yourself:

2025-07-06

I mentioned in an earlier post that I think the online documentation is now superior to any version that you can install locally.

I particularly like the way that the online version is cross-version ie: each page covers all supported versions, instead of having a separate page for each version.

But one of the really big bonuses is that you also have the opportunity to change the documentation if you think it’s incorrect or you think it could be improved. Microsoft have placed all the documentation in a GitHub repository and you can change it. Doing so is easier than you might expect.

2025-07-06