T-SQL Tuesday #104 – Code You Would Hate To Live Without

Invitation and Roundup from Bert Wagner. The next invitation should be released on August 7.

Code You Would Hate To Live Without

Before modern online programming communities, finding good code samples or sharing your own code was challenging. Forums and email lists (if searchable) were good, but beyond that you had to rely on books, coworkers, and maybe a local meetup of like-minded individuals to help you work through your programming problems.

Check out this month’s T-SQL Tuesday invitation in visual form!

Today, accessing and using code from the internet is second nature – I almost always first look online to see if a good solution already exists.  At the very least, searching blogs, GitHub, and StackOverflow for existing code is a great way to generate ideas.

For this month’s T-SQL Tuesday, I want you to write about code you’ve written that you would hate to live without.

Maybe you built a maintenance script to free up disk space, wrote a query to gather system stats for monitoring, or coded some PowerShell to clean up string data.  Your work doesn’t need to be completely original either – maybe you’ve improved the code in some open source project to better solve the problem for your particular situation.

There’s probably someone out there in the world who is experiencing the same problem that you have already solved; let’s make their life a little easier by sharing.

And don’t worry if your code isn’t perfect – just explain how your solution works and if you are aware of any caveats.  If it’s not an exact solution for someone else’s problem, at the very least it may help them generate some ideas.