T-SQL Tuesday #169 – Thank You

Invitation from Kay Sauter

T-SQL Tuesday No. 169 – December 2023 I’ve got the honor to invite you to the blog party SQLTuesday, tagged as #tsql2sday, for this December 2023. Many thanks to Steve Jones (blogtwitter) for letting me host this month’s blog party!

December is the last month of a year. I believe December is the season of being thankful, or at least looking back. I also believe that we generally do not say “thank you” enough to people. So I invite and encourage you to say thank you to anyone who helped you:

  • Work colleagues or employers
  • Mentors
  • Friends
  • Family

Your post does not have to be personal, it can also be just a story you anonymize people so that the reader who it actually matters, will know that you appreciate them. If you even can incorporate some code, please do! Happy blogging and happy SQLTuesday! Please publish your blog article on December 12 2023.

T-SQL TUESDAY #134: – GIVE ME A BREAK!

Invitation and roundup from James McGillivray.

Breaks are critical for our mental health. Write a post about relaxation techniques, dream destinations, vacation plans or anything else relating to taking a break for your own mental health.

TAKING A BREAK

2020 was a tough year. And there’s no guarantee that 2021 will be better. Hopefully it is, or at the very least, hopefully our experience in surviving 2020 will allow us to be more prepared.

In the early months of the pandemic, I was burning myself out. South Africa was in a hard lockdown, and we were prohibited from doing many of the things I usually do outside of work. Sport, exercise (outside the house), socialising, and choir were all banned. Additionally, my wife is an Emergency Physician, and at a high-risk of becoming infected, so we isolated at home as much as we possibly could.

With all this time on my hands, and no sport on TV, I started working crazy hours to keep myself occupied. And even when I wasn’t working, I was spending time in front of a screen; watching TV, browsing social media, even having a chat with my parents or friends was happening in front of a screen.

Before long, I was feeling lethargic, listless, and honestly, very down. I was struggling to provide emotional support for my wife when she needed it most, and I realized I was burned out. I knew that I needed to change something… which I will write about next week (but here are some pictures to whet your appetite).

YOUR TURN

For T-SQL Tuesday #133, I’d like to know about your own views on vacations, escapes or other breaks. Whether it’s work, technology, or any other situation that you need to get away from. Plans, memories, or relaxing activities, I want them all!

You can choose any of the topics below, or any other variation on the theme.

  • What do you do to take a break when you’re stuck at home?
  • How do you switch off, and get away from being connected 24/7?
  • If money was no issue, what would be your bucket list vacation?
  • What vacation are you dreaming of taking once it is safe to do?
  • What is the best vacation you’ve ever had?

T-SQL Tuesday #129 – Let’s Build a Time Capsule

Invitation and wrap-up from Tamara Clark.

So here we are finishing up summer. Last fall when Steve asked me to host I had this great idea…now with all of the current affairs my idea seems less than ideal. So here comes my new good idea, thanks Arlene for the help.

I want to build a time capsule, maybe we all escape to a new planet, maybe the earth just withers and dies, or maybe this is just an exercise in being positive. Tell me what few items or bits of information you’d like me to put into the #SQLCommunity time capsule. What do you want others to know about the #SQLCommunity and #SQLFamily? What do you want the finders of this time capsule to know about our current goings-on? What would you like the finder to know about you, how would you like to be remembered? Even if it’s a piece of rockin’ code that you think should live on forever, include it.

And don’t worry, you can put anything you want in our time capsule: personal, technical, not #SQLFamily related. It’s my month and I say you can do whatever you want!

T-SQL Tuesday #121: Gifts received for this year

Invitation and summary from Mala Mahadevan

It is December again. 2019 has gone by in a flash. I have the honor of hosting the last TSQL Tuesday blog party of the year. This monthly blog party started by SQL Guru Adam Machanic since 2009 has completed 121 months this year. I am the lucky host of event #121. If you are participating in this month’s party (kindly coordinated by my dear friend Steve Jones (b|t) – please be sure to read the housekeeping rules all the way below that are necessary for participation.

This is a time for material gift giving, for many of us. It might also be a time to consider the many gifts we have received through the year, and perhaps use this opportunity to appreciate people or situations that we were blessed with. So my question would be – what are a few things would you consider as gifts, and why? Some examples as below –

  • Getting to know someone in the community better,
  • Getting to speak at an event you always wanted to,
  • Attending a conference or training that you always wanted to attend,
  • Landing a job you never thought you would,
  • Published a book that you wrote,
  • Wrote for sqlservercentral/simpletalk/any of those cool websites
  • Got to play with a cool new technology that has you excited,
  • A feature of SQL Server that you always wanted and eventually showed up in 2019-I love lightweight query profiling to track query progress, for example.
  • A new cool feature that you never even thought possible is now there (I was just oooh-ing about how easy it is to script objects in Azure Data Studio, and how nice it is to have it store my query history for me).

T-SQL Tuesday #120 – What were you thinking?

Invitation and recap from Wayne Sheffield.

Ahh, November. The PASS Summit is kicking off tonight (with several great precons going on yesterday and today). Thanksgiving is right around the corner (for everyone in the United States). Right after Thanksgiving are the Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales. And since this is the first Tuesday of the month, it’s time for another T-SQL Tuesday. The brainchild of Adam Machanic (b|l|t), and designed to strengthen the SQL Server blogging community, T-SQL Tuesday gets a lot of bloggers posting about a specific theme, chosen by the host blogger (today, that’s me). And something that is really neat is that this month wraps up the 10th year of these T-SQL Tuesday posts. Wow!

Not too long ago, I ran across a situation where I was scratching my head, wondering why something had been implemented the way it had been (you can read about it here). And that gave me the idea for this T-SQL Tuesday topic.

In this month’s T-SQL Tuesday, I want to know about things that you’ve seen others do in SQL Server that have left you wondering “What were you thinking” (maybe even with a few #$%^& thrown in)? Tell us what you saw, why you thought it was so crazy, and what you did about it (if anything). And please… just tell us what you saw, not who you saw doing it.

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 | @sqlmentalresolutions, 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.