Invitation from Rob Farley

It’s my turn to host T-SQL Tuesday again. It’s been a while for me. I think the last time was when the topic was Plan Operators and my round-up included a clickable imagemap of a query plan, complete with a Paul White operator, and way too many Lookups. I’ve been contributing to T-SQL Tuesday every month, but hosting has been rare. That operator one was in 2013, and I think the only other time was T-SQL Tuesday #003 in early 2010, when I became the first person not called Adam Machanic to host one.

As always, a huge thanks to Adam for starting this back in 2009, to Steve Jones for continuing to coordinate it, and to everyone who hosts or contributes month to month.

My topic this time is Integrity.

There’s a lot to be said about this topic at the moment. Around the time the round-up for this T-SQL Tuesday is due, there will be a new American president. This isn’t a president anyone’s telling cherry-tree stories about, but I’m not sure there has ever been a politician with unblemished integrity. Perhaps the surprising thing is that the story about George Washington seems to have been considered ‘probably true’ for a very long time, standing as a plumbline for all politicians to measure themselves against. Perhaps you’ll want to write about a time when your integrity needed to stand up stronger than usual, or when you learned a lesson the hard way about the importance of integrity.

In the world of databases, we consider integrity to be of vital importance. The ACID properties of relational databases are there to ensure database integrity, so perhaps you have a story about how these properties have helped or hindered your systems. Or maybe about how you validate integrity in non-relational environments. Microsoft Fabric DW has constraints such as Primary Keys and Foreign Keys, but they aren’t enforceable. I can’t help but wonder how many people are collecting stories about that. There are differing opinions about whether these kinds of constraints are even appropriate for warehouses, so feel free to wax lyrical about that.

If you’ve had a DBCC integrity check fail on your databases, then you probably have stories about corruption, where the endings are either bad or good. I’ve been known to fix things by editing database files with a hex editor, which is not something I’d encourage but can sometimes be the best way to get data back. I’m not sure I’ll write about that, but you might have some great stories in that area.

Whatever kind of topic you want to go with, the stories are due on Tuesday January 14th, and I’ll collate them all into a round-up narrative for the 21st. Hopefully I’ll be able to weave them together into a nice story without raising any questions about my own integrity in the process. Poetic licence will only get me so far, so please provide me with some great material.

The rules:

  • Write an on-topic blog post and publish it on 14th January 2025. UTC if you can, please, but close-to otherwise.
  • Link back to here please – that always helps.
  • Comment on this post with a link to your own blog post. If I don’t see your post, I won’t mention it in the round-up.
  • Post about your blog post on LinkedIn, Bluesky, or the site once known as Twitter – the hash tag is #tsql2sday.
  • No plagiarism, and no harassment. I’m not okay with either of those things, and won’t talk about your post (nicely, at least) if you can’t be civil.
  • I recommend you add T-SQL Tuesday logo in your blog post, with a link on that image back to this invitation blog post. (But since I rarely include the logo in my own posts, I really don’t mind if you don’t – it would be hypocritical of me to insist on that.

Finally, I want to encourage you all in your blogging in general, whether you’re an occasional blogger, always-technical blogger, video blogger, or about to start. I know that there have been many months when my only blogging effort has been to respond to a T-SQL Tuesday prompt, and I like to think that that’s just fine. Almost everyone has a reason for trying to write, but even if you don’t feel like you have something to offer, please know that you do. What you write may well be found by someone in the future at just the right time for them.

…so take a moment to think about the different facets of integrity, and get writing. I look forward to reading it.