The Bit Bucket

I’ve been spending a lot of time over the last few years working through data science and AI topics. One thing that’s struck me consistently is the total lack of reasonable coding standards in almost all the sample code that I see.

I was doing an AI lab in eDX recently, and one of the questions got me to open some sample Python code for a virtual environment, and asked me to work out how the virtual world that it created operated.

2018-10-02

Simple answer: No

SQL Server has a concept of boolean data type but it doesn’t have an actual boolean data type. I can’t declare a column with a boolean data type, and I can’t use it that way. However, the concept of boolean data is present.

For example, if I write the following:

SELECT * FROM Sometable WHERE Somecolumn = Someothercolumn

the outcome of that comparison is TRUE, FALSE, or (don’t forget) NULL. And remember that NULL isn’t a value; it’s the lack of a value. WHERE clauses are satisfied when the value of the predicate is TRUE.

2018-10-01

I mentioned in a previous review about how much I enjoyed The Rosie Project by Graeme Simsion. I couldn’t wait for the sequel to come out and so I eagerly read The Rosie Effect: A Novel as soon as it was released.

The first book introduced us to Don Tillman, working on genetics at a local university and trying to help Rosie find her father. All along, he’s trying to find a wife using scientific principles.

2018-09-28

SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) is a great tool for working with SQL Server relational databases but it can do much more than that.

In Object Explorer, note that you can easily connect to other types of services:

For a long time, it has been able to connect to Analysis Services to manage SSAS databases, both tabular and multi-dimensional. It can connect to Integration Services but that’s to the older style interface for SSIS. Nowadays, you should use the SSIS Catalog instead. There are a few items that you can configure via the Reporting Services connection as well.

2018-09-27

I mentioned in a previous post about how I sometimes need to work with binary strings in SQL Server using T-SQL.  The literal values are hexadecimal strings. T-SQL doesn’t have a simple function to just convert one of these character-pair strings to an integer.

In our free SDU Tools for developers and DBAs, as well as the HexCharStringToChar function, we added a function HexCharStringToInt to do just this.

You can see the outcome in the main image above.

2018-09-26

For a long time, passwords have troubled me conceptually. I now believe that, as a concept, they are beyond broken. As an industry, we need to do better.

I might well need to do with more identities, passwords, multi-factor authentication options, etc. than the average consumer but I know it’s beyond me to get this right, at least in the way that vendors, financial institutions, and source providers expect me to.

2018-09-25

It’s common to need to have a way to read a row of data from a table, to be able to modify it, and to then update it back into the table, but only if it hasn’t been changed in the meantime. But we don’t want to lock it in the meantime. That’s the basis of optimistic concurrency. By contrast, pessimistic concurrency would hold locks the whole time. In SQL Server, you should use the rowversion data type to implement optimistic concurrency.

2018-09-24

You would have to be hiding under a rock to have missed the current low-carb ways of eating, and particularly the ketogenic thinking about food. Central to much of this thinking though is cutting carbs in general. The hard part about this for most people, is cutting the primary source of carbs and that’s sugar.

If ever there was a leader of the fight against sugar, it’s Gary Taubes. His book The Case Against Sugar is very significant.

2018-09-21

If you have ever started SQL Server Management Studio in an isolated environment (ie: one with no external Internet connectivity), you’ll find that it’s slower to start.

That’s because SQL Server uses signed assemblies, and whenever an application with signed assemblies starts, it needs to check whether or not the certificate that they were signed with has been revoked. It’s not good enough to just check if it’s a valid certificate.

2018-09-20

On occasions I have to work with binary strings in SQL Server using T-SQL.  The literal values are hexadecimal strings. T-SQL doesn’t have a simple function to just convert one of these character-pair strings to a character.

In our free SDU Tools for developers and DBAs, we added a function HexCharStringToChar to do just this.

You can see the outcome in the main image above.

You can see it in action here:

2018-09-19