The Bit Bucket

Just a short post today to call out something that I’m seeing again and again. It’s where organizations purchase all their hardware and software platforms before they start to carry out a proof of concept. This is a very poor option.

I was reading the data strategy for a global company that I was doing consulting work for. They were proudly introducing the new strategy yet I was sitting looking at it, trying to work out what they were thinking. The first step of their plan was to buy everything they needed. The second step was to carry out a proof of concept to see how it would all work (presuming it would work suitably at all).

2018-09-04

Most companies have some sort of ongoing maintenance processes that perform periodic backups of databases. They also have log backups scheduled for any databases that are online and in full recovery model. However, when you first create a database, it might be in full recovery model yet never have had a full backup performed. If your scheduled jobs then try to create a log backup prior to the first full backup, the backup will fail, and that might make your job fail.

2018-09-03

Another fairly famous business book that I’ve read lately is Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make Competition Irrelevant by V Chan Kim and Renee Maubo. Apparently over a million copies of this has been sold.

I really liked the basic premise of this book. It describes how most companies keep looking at what their existing customers want, and often that’s in what they call a red ocean ie: where all the sharks are fighting and tearing things apart.

2018-08-31

In a previous post, I mentioned that when a long running query completes, I might not have been waiting around for it, and so I wanted to know when it completed.

But sometimes I do wait around for a query to complete, yet I’m distracted by other things and don’t realize that the query has actually completed. That’s not surprising because if a query takes a long time, I’m probably going to go on with other work while that’s running.

2018-08-30

We’ve been building tools to create scripts for various SQL Server T-SQL objects for a long time. Part of scripting a table is the scripting of the data type. That means its datatype name, precision, scale, and maximum length.

In our free SDU Tools for developers and DBAs, we added a scalar function called FormatDataTypeName ot make that easy. It takes the following parameters:

@DataTypeName sysname - the name of the data type @Precision int - the decimal or numeric precision @Scale int - the scale for the value @MaximumLength - the maximum length of string values

2018-08-29

In the 1980’s and 1990’s, part of my time was spent as a lecturer and tech services manager at a university. I particularly loved working with final year students and their project work. At our regular meetings though, I also often got into discussion with the students about their career plans, as they were about to graduate. What amazed me was how many super-bright students were looking to take incredibly boring jobs working on ancient technologies, in what were basically programmer graveyards, and when I asked them why they were intending to go there, invariably they’d tell me that they thought those jobs would be long term and low risk.

2018-08-28

I’ve just finished delivering a bunch of presentations across New Zealand, and one of the sessions that I’ve delivered in several places is Things I Wish Developers Knew About SQL Server. In that session, I mentioned briefly that most single column SQL Server indexes that people create are at best pointless, and at worst counterproductive.

I often see people making a poor attempt at indexing, and when they don’t know what they need to do, they often add individual indexes on many columns in their tables. This isn’t a good idea.

2018-08-27

I’ve been listening to a lot of audio books lately and one that caught my eye was Mistakes were made (but not by me) by Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson.

One of the mistakes that we all can make (and I’ve done it so many times myself) is to make a decision, find out it’s wrong, but to then hang on to it for way too long.

It was fascinating (and probably a little depressing) how often I could recognize aspects of myself while reading this book.

2018-08-24

I commonly run into a few connection-related scenarios:

• I’m working on a large query and need to run it against several servers, not concurrently, but one after the other.
• I’ve just made a database connection, and got my query ready, only to discover that I’ve connected to the wrong server.

Either way, what I’ve seen people do in these scenarios is to:

• Select all the text in the current query
• Copy it
• Open a new query window
• Paste the code

That’s all good but SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) has had a simpler way of doing this for quite a while.

2018-08-23

Fellow MVP Paul White and others have discussed the indexing of small segments of strings, to make fast indexes that I think are somewhat like full-text indexes but potentially more efficient. Three character substrings are common, and are known as trigrams.

I’ve experimented with these at a number of site and seen really interesting (good) results.

In our free SDU Tools for developers and DBAs, we added a table-valued function ExtractTrigrams to help with this. You can pass it a string, and it will pull it apart for you, and return the set of trigrams. This would make it much easier for you to experiment with these types of indexes.

2018-08-22