Invitations – Page 10 – T-SQL Tuesday

T-SQL Tuesday #045 – Follow the Yellow Brick Road

Invitation and summary from Mickey Stuewe.

An audit trail is needed for various reasons. Some companies need it for compliance, others need it to find out who “accidently” did something stupid last week, and some specialized audit trails can tell you how the data has changed over time.

So, it is time to follow Dorothy and Toto down the yellow brick road and to share your experience with auditing data. If you are new to the T-SQL Tuesday blog party and need some ideas, here are a few:

How to implement SQL Server Audit which was introduced in SQL 2008.
Your favorite audit pattern.
Your worst experience with an implementation of a bad auditing pattern.

T-SQL Tuesday #044 – Second Chance

Invitation and roundup from Bradley Balls.

As a DBA or a Presenter/Speaker we have all had at least one moment we would like back. The demo didn’t work, you were green and got asked a question you now know in your sleep. You had a presentation in front of a client, and it all went sideways. Maybe you logged onto the prod server thinking it was dev and dropped something you shouldn’t have. These moments serve not just as painful reminders, but also as powerful instruments for learning. Would you like another shot at getting it right? WELL NOW’S YOUR CHANCE! Or I guess actually your…. Second…. Chance. Your missions should you choose to accept it, tell me one of the moments you had, and most importantly what you learned from it!

First and foremost the rules.

Rule 1: Don’t get yourself fired. If you almost dropped the prod DB last week, truncated an important table, or took down a prod server during critical business hours, and nobody knows it was you & the people you work for read your blog, you should probably avoid writing about it here. You want to write about events we can look back on and reflect over, not events HR would *love* to know about.

T-SQL Tuesday #043 – Hello, Operator?

Invitation and roundup from Rob Farley.

The topic is Plan Operators. If you ever write T-SQL, you will almost certainly have looked at execution plans (if you haven’t, go look at some now. I mean really – you should be looking at this stuff). As you look at these things, you will almost certainly have had your interest piqued by some, and tried to figure out a bit more about what’s going on.

That’s what I want you to write about! One (or more) plan operators that you looked into. It could be a particular aspect of a plan operator, or you could do a deep dive and tell us everything you know. You could relate a tuning story if you want, or it could be completely academic. Don’t just quote Books Online at me, explain what the operator means to you. You could explore the Compute Scalar operator, or the many-to-many feature of a Merge Join. The Sequence Project, or the Lazy Spool. You’re bound to have researched one of them at some point (if you never have, take the opportunity this week), and have some wisdom to impart. This is a chance to raise the collective understanding about execution plans!

T-SQL Tuesday #042 – The Long and Winding Road

Invitation from Wendy Pastrick. No roundup.

Here’s what I thought it would be fun to share with the community this time around – we all experience change in our work lives. Maybe you have a new job, or a new role at your company. Maybe you’re just getting started and you have a road map to success in mind. Whatever it is, please share it next week, Tuesday May 14th. Make sure you note what technologies you find are key to your interests or successes, and maybe you will inspire someone to look down a road less traveled.

One thing I think would be great to see included in these stories is to hear about how you always thought technology “X” was so awesome, and either it lived up to the hype for you, or maybe it morphed into something else over time. Let’s make these stories about the tech and how that has led you down a certain path.

T-SQL Tuesday #040 – Files and Filegroups

Invitation and roundup from Jen McCown.

Hold on! I already hear some of you shouting, “Boooooring!!!” You don’t have to write a file and filegroup primer, if you don’t want to. Get creative, get tangential! Some of my suggestions:

Maybe you’d like to talk about partitioning indexes or tables across filegroups
Or performance benefits (still!) of assigning tables to specific drives, via filegroups
Or FILESTREAM, specifically (hey, that’s something that requires a specialized filegroup!)
Or some horrible misuse of filegroups you’ve seen once (we always love a SQL horror story)
Or, if you have a mind, a file and filegroup backup/restore primer! (Why not? I’m not the only one who loves basics.)

So talk to us, tell us all of your file and filegroup lore!

T-SQL Tuesday #039 – Can You Shell What the PoSH is Cooking?

Invitation and recap from Wayne Sheffield.

This month, for the first time, I’m hosting the T-SQL Tuesday Party, and you are all invited. I struggled to come up with a suitable topic (for all of 2 seconds), and decided to tie it in with the blog series on PowerShell that I’m currently blogging on. So I’m asking you to blog about using PowerShell for doing, well, anything as long as it is related to SQL Server or the computer that SQL Server runs on. Scripts are encouraged, but not required. I’ll follow up with a recap of the posts about a week later.

T-SQL Tuesday #037 – Joins

Invitation and roundup from Sebastian Meine.

The Invite

As many of you know already, I decided to declare December 2012 as the month of the JOIN by writing the A Join A Day blog series. So, it should be quite obvious what this month T-SQL Tuesday is about. You guessed correctly — I would like you to join me in talking about joins. Now you might think “If Sebastian is writing 31 posts about JOINs already there is nothing left to write about.” But I can assure you that there is still plenty out there. In my series I am going to cover just the basics. For example, what is a cross join or an anti-semi-join? What is the difference between a hash and a merge join? There are many things I won’t be able to cover, for example how to write efficient join queries.

Your mission – should you accept – is to write about topics like the good and the bad patterns of joining you have seen out there or really anything else that comes to your mind when thinking about joins:

Have you had to deal with a slow monster join that you were able to conquer? Let us know how you did it.
Have you noticed a join pattern in use that is really not good for readability but you come across it time and time again? Tell us how to do it better.
Have you discovered a really cool way of using the APPLY command instead of a JOIN to force the execution engine to utilize the existing CPU resources more effectively? We would like to hear about it.

And if you have a topic that you always wanted to write about but that is only remotely related to joins, feel free to use it anyway and make sure to tell us why you think it is related to joins.

Hope to see you (or at least your post) next week at the party.

T-SQL Tuesday #036 – What Does Community Mean to You?

Invitation and roundup from Chris Yates

The Invitation

Merriam-Webster defines Community as “a unified body of individuals”. For me the SQL Community is something that has helped me in my career; whether it is questions that I’ve had along the way where I was stuck, helping other DBA’s with issues they were having, networking with other DBA’s or making contacts for the future. The SQL Community is just that; we are a team. All on the same team; if one falls we pick each other up. I’ve never been part of a group of people who want to help each other more so than the SQL Community.

One of the best conferences I’ve been to is the PASS Summit. I was fortunate enough to attend last year and this years will provide new attendees the same fortune and opportunities that I have had. Sitting and seeing some of the top DBA’s in the industry learning in sessions along with me…..yeah I was floored.

So my question today is a simple one; I had several topics to choose from technically but I’m curious as to what others think about our SQL Community. Not just some off the cuff answer but really what do you think about it and how has it helped you?

Below are some thoughts I had in creating this topic:

How has the community helped me in my career
How can I better the community
How can I preserve what we already have
How can I help other people in the community

T-SQL Tuesday #34 – Help! I Need Somebody

Invitation from Rob Volk.

n the beginning…

SQL Server has changed a lot since I started with it. <Cranky Old Guy>Back in my day, Books Online was neither. There were no blogs. Google was the third-place search site. There were perhaps two or three community forums where you could ask questions. (Besides the Microsoft newsgroups…which you had to access with Usenet. And endure the wrath of…Celko.) Your “training” was reading a book, made from real dead trees, that you bought from your choice of brick-and-mortar bookstore. And except for your local user groups, there were no conferences, seminars, SQL Saturdays, or any online video hookups where you could interact with a person. You’d have to call Microsoft Support…on the phone…a LANDLINE phone. And none of this “SQL Family” business!</Cranky Old Guy>

Even now, with all these excellent resources available, it’s still daunting for a beginner to seek help for SQL Server. The product is roughly 1247.4523 times larger than it was 15 years ago, and it’s simply impossible to know everything about it.* So whether you are a beginner, or a seasoned pro of over a decade’s experience, what do you do when you need help on SQL Server?

T-SQL Tuesday #32 – A Day in the Life

Invitat i on and roundup from Erin Stellato .

When we were kids, sometime during elementary school, adults started asking, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” The professions initially mentioned varied, but they were often along the lines of teacher, doctor, nurse, fireman, policeman, singer, engineer, etc. Obviously these are not the only professions in the world. There are so many different occupations that exist, that whenever I meet someone, I usually ask what they do. It’s not unusual for someone to list a title I’ve never heard (Improvement Coordinator is one I heard the other day). But a title doesn’t tell me what that person does. Even when someone’s a doctor or a teacher, there are so many variations nowadays that I always follow up with, “Well what do you do every day?” And I ask because I really want to know. So tell me…

This month’s T-SQL Tuesday post is about you and your job. Specifically, on Wednesday July 11^th or Thursday July 12^th, track what you do for an entire day and then write about it. Hopefully one of those days is a “typical” day and not a vacation day (if it is, then just pick another day or do your best), but ideally, everyone writes about what they did on one specific day.

The scope of this topic is wide open, you don’t have to simply list what you did – feel free to elaborate on what tasks you love or don’t love, your favorite or least favorite part of the day. Make the post as non-technical or technical as you want (maybe you learned something new that was really cool). My only request is that you list your official title, as I plan to include them in some way in my summary post.