T-SQL Tuesday #028 – Jack of All Trades or Master of None

Invitation and summary from Argenis Fernandez.

I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve heard that phrase.

Are you specialized? On something? Or anything at all? Has that been a good or a bad thing? Why?

Are you the SQL guy at work? Or the one who does everything?

Do you code? And configure wireless routers at work also?

If you had to pick one thing to specialize on, what would it be?

Over the course of my career I’ve worn many many hats. I always felt I was doing fine, had a stable job, but wasn’t quite fond of my prospects for the future. Then a friend said that I should focus on one thing and be the best at it. And while I’m most certainly NOT the best at it, I’ve gotten progressively better on it, to the degree that I’ve been called an ‘Expert’ by some (hate that word!) – I’d rather be called ‘knowledgeable’. My career took off like a rocket after I specialized, and certainly choosing to focus on one thing (SQL Server, in my case) has been one of the best decisions I’ve ever made. I’ve also been careful of not forgetting my roots as a SysAdmin – and always try to keep up with changes on the Windows/SAN/Networking front, but not with the same level of intensity.

So, in this installment of T-SQL Tuesday I’d like to ask you to blog about your experience. Tell us why you specialized, or why you’d like to specialize. If you don’t think that specialization is a good thing, tell us why. Discuss. Argue your point(s).

T-SQL Tuesday #027 – Invitation to The Big Data Valentine’s Edition

Invitation and roundup from Steve Jones.

Big Data

The party falls on Valentine’s Day this month, and I thought a little notice would let you get your post done early, and then spend the day with your loved ones

Since the media has a love affair with Big Data right now, I thought this would make an interesting topic. Data is the lifeblood of our careers and of many organizations. Slowly governments, companies, and individuals are becoming aware of just how important data is to us, and as they do, they want more of it. More storage, more access, and more analysis.

That creates challenges for us as data professionals. We will have to learn to better manipulate, aggregate, summarize, and handle larger volumes of data in the future. I think this means we will have lots of employment in this area, and it means tremendous opportunity for those that learn to work with data well.

This month I want to hear what big data problems you’ve solved, or interesting ways of working with big data, challenges that you struggle with, or cool hardware tricks that mask the problems in your code.

Think big, and let us know how you work with Big Data.

T-SQL Tuesday #026 – Second Chances

Invitation from David Howard. (site gone, but invitation here).

Every new year brings with it a fresh start, a second chance to do things differently. In the spirit of second chances, for this month’s T-SQL Tuesday, please pick any one of the previous 25 T-SQL Tuesday topics and write about it. You can choose one of the topics you participated in before, or you can choose one you missed for some reason.

Maybe you were just too busy when Michael Swart invited everyone to write about indexes. Or maybe you weren’t quite happy with the CTE post you came up with when Bob Pusateri hosted. Or maybe you have a ton to say about IO, but like me, you didn’t know anything about T-SQL Tuesday until long after Mike Walsh’s month.

Well now is your chance to set things straight! In fact, if you like, you can even throw down a few resolutions for the new year (see Jen McCown’s #14). And if this is your first T-SQL Tuesday, just pick a topic and jump in.

Wrap Up

Thank you everyone who participated in T-SQL Tuesday #026! I really enjoyed hosting and reading all of the contributions. Thanks also to Adam Machanic (blog | @AdamMachanic) for starting this monthly event and for allowing me to run this show this time around.

We had 14 posts, covering about 10 different topics depending on how you count. Here’s a brief summary of them all, in the order received.

1. The first post was from Rob Farley (blog | @rob_farley), a T-SQL Tuesday regular and one of my favorite SQL bloggers. He writes about a limitation of using APPLY when dealing with working calculations which he had written about in an earlier post.
Original T-SQL Tuesday 17 / 25

2. Sebastian Meine (blog | @sqlity) delves into some index internals, explaining SQL Server’s B+ tree structure, and how that is different from a standard B-Tree.
Original T-SQL Tuesday 10 / 11

3. Steve Wales (blog | @walessj) tells a tale of T-SQL Tuesday, managing to incorporate references to all the past 25 events – very creative! He also let us in on his 2012 resolutions, which match up with mine in a lot of ways (except for that one with the “O” word )
Original T-SQL Tuesday 14

4. After a brief intro in French and some cool New Year’s Eve images, Jason Brimhall (blog| @sqlrnnr) covers several type of ways to perform JOINs on tables where a bitmask is applied to an id field.
Original T-SQL Tuesday 23

5. I enjoyed reading Jason Grobe’s (blog | @sqlmental) resolutions, which cover both personal, professional and community oriented goals. More power to you Jason!
Original T-SQL Tuesday 14

6. Nancy Hidy Wilson (blog | @NancyHidyWilson) extols the virtues of her favorite “new” features in SQL 2008 R2: CMS (Central Management Server) and PBM (Policy Based Management).
Original T-SQL Tuesday 7

7. Mike Fal (blog | @Mike_Fal) shows a trick for dynamically generating a restore command using the output of a RESTORE FILELISTONLY command. Very cool.
Original T-SQL Tuesday 25

8. Robert Pearl (blog | @PearlKnows) shows us the “best of all worlds” with a very comprehensive query against the missing index DMVs.
Original T-SQL Tuesday 25

9. Aaron Bertrand (blog | @AaronBertrand) shares some work he did at a previous job to implement customer time zone logic at the database layer simplifying the presentation to the application.
Original T-SQL Tuesday 22

10. Steve Jones (blog | @way0utwest) discusses a topic I run into all the time reviewing code, how to deal with the time component of a date range correctly.
Original T-SQL Tuesday 1

11. Colleen Morrow (blog | @ClevelandDBA) shares some of her new year’s resolutionswith us as well as her strategy for keeping up with them. I really like her idea of breaking them down into monthly chunks so they don’t seem so daunting.
Original T-SQL Tuesday 14

12. My (blog | @daveh0ward) contribution was a brief discussion of what I think experienced DBA’s provide to an organization.
Original T-SQL Tuesday 12

13. Carlos Bossy (blog | @carlosbossy) covers a topic I’m excited to learn more about: the new windowing functions in SQL 2012, specifically in dealing with sliding aggregations.
Original T-SQL Tuesday 16

14. Ricardo Leka (blog | @bigleka) shares an improvement to a previous SQLCMD script he wrote to allow for creating a database mirror in a more dynamic way.
Original T-SQL Tuesday 25

Thanks again to everyone who contributed! See you next month.

T-SQL Tuesday #025 – Invitation to Share Your Tricks

Invitation and followup from Allen White

It doesn’t seem that long ago that having cool little tidbits of information about SQL Server made a huge difference in how effective you could be. Well, that’s still true, but let me give you an example.

SELECT name FROM sysobjects WHERE sysstat & 4 > 0

In the early days of SQL Server, this was the way to pull a list of the names of all the stored procedures in your database. The 4 bit in the sysstat column represented stored procedures. (1 represented user tables and 2 represented view, as I recall, so changing the WHERE clause to read WHERE sysstat & 7 > 0 returned all tables, views and stored procedures.)

As SQL Server has evolved, Microsoft has made it easier to query the metadata to determine what objects existed, adding columns that helped (like ‘Type’ in this case), catalog views, Dynamic Management Objects, etc.

So, the challenge for this month’s T-SQL Tuesday is: What T-SQL tricks do you use today to make your job easier? (Notice I didn’t say PowerShell – I have a bunch of those now, but this is T-SQL Tuesday, not PowerShell Tuesday.)

T-SQL Tuesday #024 – Prox ‘n’ Funx

Invitation and roundup from Brad Shulz.

You are hereby invited to this month’s T-SQL Tuesday #024, which will take place on November 8, 2011.

So, all you T-SQL Bloggers out there, please join the blog party and write up something revolving around this month’s topic: Prox ‘n’ Funx (which is just a coo-ul way of referring to Procedures and Functions).

This topic covers a lot of ground, so there’s a myriad of possibilities in what you can write about. You could discuss a really cool stored procedure or function that you wrote. You could write about a Dynamic Management Function that you can’t live without… or perhaps write about some of the new functions that are coming in SQL2012. How about limitations or “gotchas” or performance issues in working with procedures and functions? And on and on and on…

T-SQL Tuesday #023 – Joins

Invitation and roundup from Stuart Ainsworth.

Topic d’jour? JOINS (I’m in a fundamentals mood lately). Note that I also like creative and esoteric posts, so if you can find a way to apply SQL as a metaphorical language for community activity, I’ll read it and enjoy it. If you just want to tell me in a simple fashion the difference between a HASH and MERGE join, I’m cool with that, too.

T-SQL Tuesday #022 – Data Presentation

Invitation and round-up from Robert Pearl.

On to this month’s Topic

What I have described above may be some behind-the-scenes details, but nevertheless, I packaged it in such a way that would provide entertainment (maybe ridicule?) to the reader at large. This was my presentation to the reader.

Therefore, the topic of this month’s T-SQL Tuesday is, “data-presentation” Or put better, formatting data for presentation to the end-user.

We may be the developers, and techno-geeks behind the code, whether simple, advanced, spaghetti, or otherwise. But, the data the user sees is most critical. The query output, the report, or data presentation, must be absolutely formatted in such a way that is easily understandable and readable by the end-user. The end-user can be the boss, supervisor, department head, the analyst, employees, or customers. And they must be the ones we cater our queries to!

It helps a lot, if we can simplify our code too. For example, when doing comparative analysis of the dataset results returned by a query, it makes it completely understandable if the output includes a percentage column. While for the end-user, it may be hard to digest milliseconds, megabytes, totals, and other assorted aggregated data, everyone can easily comprehend when something is X% percentage out of the whole.

For example, with the advent of Common Table Expressions (CTE), this makes it a whole lot easier to return all the data rows, along with the percentage in one single T-SQL pass.

Therefore, I am inviting you all to write about “data presentation” to the user. This can be in the form of T-SQL code, an SSRS report, etc. What can you do to streamline data presentation? I used a CTE, you can use one, but you don’t have to. No hard format, just be creative, and mention the importance of data presentation.

T-SQL Tuesday #021 – A Day Late and Totally Full Of It.

Invitation from Adam Machanic.

“This ugly hack is only temporary,” you think. Six months later, a coworker curses your name, sacrificing a chicken to any deity that will help expedite your getting struck down by lightning, a school bus, or both.

Crap code. We’ve all seen it. We’ve all created it. We’re all guilty. Yes, even you. Sometimes our crap is purposeful—the ugly, “temporary” hack. Sometimes we produce crap because we simply don’t know any better. But there is no excuse good enough. As professionals, we must strive to rid ourselves of bad habits. And the only way to learn the difference is to see lots, and lots, and lots of examples.

That’s where you come in. This month’s T-SQL Tuesday challenge: reveal your crap to the world. Why is (or was) it crap? Why did you do it? And how did you learn from your mistake?

T-SQL Tuesday #020 – T-SQL Best Practices

Invitation and summary from Amit Banerjee.

What is the topic for July?

The topic for July is “T-SQL Best Practices”. If you work with SQL Server, then undoubtedly you would have had to write T-SQL queries atleast once or would have had to debug the seemingly useful piece of T-SQL code written by your developers to find out where the performance bottleneck or problem was. Your post for this month’s revolving blog party could be along one of the areas:

a. A set of T-SQL best practices that you follow in your shop that or you believe that should be followed always. It could be as specific as for writing only linked server queries or writing queries for SSIS packages etc.
b. An issue that you resolved because certain T-SQL best practices were not followed.
c. A workaround that you used (like query hints) to resolve an issue where T-SQL best practices couldn’t be implemented due to involvement of a third party solution.

Why did I choose this topic?

Over the years of troubleshooting SQL performance related issues, I have found on multiple occasions that the T-SQL query in question was performing badly because certain best practices for writing that piece of code were not followed and the one responsible for the development had not foreseen that such an oversight could become a bottleneck when the data or the number of users increased. So, I thought it would be a good idea to get the SQL Community’s thoughts around best practices in this area. Sometimes, the most obvious things are the easiest to overlook!

T-SQL Tuesday #019 – Disasters and Recovery

Invitation and wrapup from Allen Kinsel.

Disasters

Its the first week of June and for those of us living along the Gulf and Atlantic coasts of the US, that brings the beginning of hurricane season. It also means its time for this months installment of T-SQL Tuesday.

This Months Topic

There goes your weekend/month

Disaster Recovery. This topic is very near and dear to me based on the fact that I live on a barrier island that was the site to the deadliest natural disaster in US history and more recently destroyed by the third costliest hurricane in history. Needless to say preparing for disasters is nearly instinctive to me which might explain why I’m a DBA but I digress. Anything you’d like to blog about related to preparing for or recovering from a disaster would be fair game, have a great tip you use to keep backups and recovers running smoothly, a horrific story of recovery gone wrong? or anything else related to keeping your systems online during calamity. We want to hear it!