The Bit Bucket

I wrote last week about how I don’t like unnecessary abbreviations. It’s all part of a desire to see higher quality code, because that costs less to maintain and support.

Another key issue that troubles me in development is when I see inconsistency.

Single Brain

When you have a team of people doing work, you need to endlessly try to make the outcome look like it’s come from a single brain. And equally importantly, make it look like it’s come from a single brain that cares about quality and attention to detail.

2019-09-12

Every now and again, I need to store IP address values in T-SQL and I want to check if the string that I’m passed is a valid IP address. So, in our free SDU Tools for developers and DBAs, we added a simple tool that works that out. It’s called IsIPv4Address.

You can tell by the name that it only works with IPv4 addresses, not IPv6.

Nothing complex. It takes a string, checks the format, and the range of octet values, and returns its verdict.

2019-09-11

I attend a lot of online meetings nowadays, and I can’t tell you how often at meeting that starts at 10 AM actually ends up starting at 10:05 AM or 10:10 AM to cater for people who are running late. Right now I’m in yet another meeting that hasn’t started yet, as we’re just “giving it a few minutes for stragglers to join”.

Now it’s a different story if there is a specific person who really is needed in the meeting, and they’ve let you know they are running a few minutes late. But I see this as routine in pretty much every meeting I attend. Meetings almost never start at the correct time.

2019-09-10

While it might be obvious that it’s important to format your T-SQL code for readability, it might be less obvious that there’s no agreed standard for how to format that code.

Everybody has their own style. The main thing. People will tell you all the time is just to be consistent. But then they’ll tell you they don’t like the format you’ve used.

Take a reasonable style and then to just keep applying it.

2019-09-09

Like most products, Snowflake comes in a number of editions, and you can see the current editions in the main image above. (Keep in mind that they could always change at any time and to check their site for the current options).

First thing I need to say is that I really like the way that most of the SQL code surface is pretty much identical across editions. I wish that was complete coverage but it currently doesn’t include materialized views.

2019-09-06

There’s an old joke in computing about how you can spend 90% of the time on a project working out what to name things, and end up without time for doing the work.

Phil Karlton is credited with having said: There are only two hard problems in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things.

I really liked Jeff Atwood’s or Leon Bambrick’s update though: There are two hard things in computer science: cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-one errors. (Can’t work out who said it first).

2019-09-05

I regularly run into situations where I need to execute a T-SQL command in each database on a server. The built-in Microsoft method is to call the unsupported sp_MSforeachdb, and there have been other methods over the years. None of them really worked the way that I wanted them to, so in our free SDU Tools for developers and DBAs, we added a tool that does just that. It’s called ExecuteCommandInEachDB.

2019-09-04

I’ve been in the IT industry a long time. I see trends come and go. (Mostly they go). At this point, I think I’m an OK judge of what’s going to fly and what isn’t. (Far from perfect but OK).

One thing that always puzzles me though is the way the word Modern is used as a put-down for things that aren’t modern, as though it’s a synonym for the word Better.

2019-09-03

It’s really important when you’re writing SQL Server code (or T-SQL in particular) that you add comments to the code where something isn’t obvious to someone who’s reading it.

Here’s an example of comments being used:

There are two ways that comments can be added:

If you put a double-dash on a line, anything after it is a comment.

If you need to comment a block of code, you can put a /* to start the comment and */ to end it. I’m not a fan of block comments in T-SQL because you can’t nest one comment inside another comment. With the double-dash method, that’s not a problem.

2019-09-02

I mentioned in my last post in this series, that the Compute layer of Snowflake is basically made up of a series of Virtual Warehouses (VWs).  Each VW is an MPP (massively parallel processing) compute cluster that can comprise one or more compute nodes.

The number of nodes in the compute cluster is called its “size” and the sizing options are made to resemble T-Shirt sizing, as you can see in the main image above.

2019-08-30