It’s that time of year again when people look philosophically back at the current year, and start to think about how they’ll improve their situation in the new year. But for many, this is a very hard time of the year.
I’ve had a few friends this year who seem to have almost lost hope when they’ve ended up in poor situations.
I just wanted to make a short post to encourage you all to never lose hope. Alexander Pope said:
2018-12-18
One of my colleagues Orin Thomas is a prolific writer. I’ve lost count of how many detailed books he’s written, and I’ve no doubt he’s lost count as well. If you’ve worked in Microsoft-related IT for any length of time, I’m sure you’ll have read one of his books, particularly if you’ve been involved in certification. You can see a partial list of his books here.
But the other thing that amazes me about Orin is that he’s also a prolific reader. I can’t believe how many books he gets through, and he’s inspired me to get through way more. I have not the slightest doubt that being a good reader is a prerequisite for being a good writer. Every time I meet with Orin, he mentions books that I should read. I note them down, and slowly make my way through many of them.
2018-12-14
I’ve mentioned before that SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) is a good tool for analyzing queries, as much as for executing them.
In SQL Server 2005, query plans had missing index details added. When a query plan was created, SQL Server recorded that it thought it could have executed the query better, if only you’d provided it with appropriate indexes. But at that point, the suggestions weren’t very good, and the tools didn’t show them.
2018-12-13
Years ago, it was common to need to print checks (cheques) from computer systems. Fortunately checks have now pretty much disappeared in most countries. One of the challenges with printing a check, was that you needed to convert an amount of money into words. Even though checks are on the wane, it’s still important to do that on some contracts, etc. In our free SDU Tools for developers and DBAs, we added a function NumberAsText to do just that.
2018-12-12
When I’m running SQL Server Advanced T-SQL classes, we spend time discussing cursors. The general message is that most of the time, but not always, cursors are the wrong answer. The problem with cursors is that instead of telling SQL Server what you want it to work out (ie: declarative query), you are telling it how to work that out (ie: procedural query).
You’ll hear people say to never use cursors. This is also incorrect. There are occasions where I do use cursors. Mostly this is when I’m building utilities that do things like scripting objects in the database. I’d almost never use a cursor though, in general data processing running against SQL Server. You don’t want to be doing row by row processing against the server.
2018-12-12
I used to do a lot of work at the operating system and network level. I was always fascinated watching people use network trace tools when they were trying to debug a problem. The challenge was that they had no idea what was normal activity on the network, and what wasn’t.
The end result of this is that they’d then spend huge amounts of time chasing down what were really just red herrings.
2018-12-11
Old PC style databases and tools (like Access and DBase) and most 4GL databases tended to use the words Record and Field to describe the layout of tables. Relational SQL databases use the terms Row and Column. I endlessly hear discussions about if there’s a difference, and where that lies.
Some will argue, for example, that a field is a data value within a single record or row. That would make a field more like a cell in Excel, than a column in Excel.
2018-12-10
I’m a fan of Pat Flynn. If you haven’t listened to his Smart Passive Income podcast, and you have any interest in being self-sufficient without “working for the man”, Pat’s podcast would be a good start. Pat has people ask him about ideas though and he’s put his ideas on how to work out if an idea is worth pursuing in his book: Will It Fly? How to Test Your Next Business Idea So You Don’t Waste Your Time and Money.
2018-12-07
Well today WordPress on my blog site went up to version 5.0. I knew a new editor (Gutenberg) had been coming to replace the classic editor but I hadn’t had time to try it. So when it did the upgrade, I happily let it go and install the new editor.
Then I tried to write a post.
Oh my goodness, that was just a horrid, horrid experience. I can see what they’ve tried to do but it literally took me about five times longer than normal to write a single post.
2018-12-07
One of the advantages of SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) is that it can be used to analyze queries, not just to execute them.
There are two basic types of query plan: estimated execution plans, and actual execution plans.
For a typical query, I can obtain the estimated execution plan, by hitting Ctrl-L, choosing the option in the Query menu, or clicking on the toolbar icon:
Let’s do this for the following query:
2018-12-06
