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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 #038 – Standing Firm

Invitation and recap from Jason Brimhall.

To kick off the new year (2013), we must first adhere to a little tradition.  This is not a T-SQL Tuesday tradition.  It is more of an annual tradition for all to welcome the new year.  Feel free to click the link and sing along!!

Now for the theme.  A common thing for many people to do this time of year is to do a little self reflection.  Some set meaningful goals for themselves.  Fewer actually accomplish those goals or even follow-up after initially setting the goal.

We are not going to set goals as a part of this T-SQL Tuesday – unless you want to.  I want to take a little different spin on the New Year’s “resolution” tradition.  So the theme this month is “Standing Firm.”

The idea for this theme is to start with a little self reflection.  Then to come up with a story relating to one of these words: resolve, resolution, or resolute.  Here are some examples of how these stories may be portrayed.

  • Resolve:  A system outage occurred and you “resolved” it.
  • Resolute:  You made an executive decision and did not waver from it.
  • Resolution:  You discovered a bug and documented a work-a-round resolution for it.
  • Resolution:  You have discovered certain T-SQL skills are fuzzy and want to sharpen your ability in that area.
  • Resolute:  You are determined to improve performance in your application.

All of these words are very closely related.  It is up to you to determine how you would like to apply them to your T-SQL world.  Your experiences and stories can be loosely or tightly coupled to T-SQL, it is up to you.

And since the theme requires a little bit of self-reflection first, bonus kudos to those that can tie a past experience to a future plan.

2012 T-SQL Tuesdays

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 #35 – Soylent Green

Invitation and Roundup from Nick Haslam

Over the past couple of days I’ve been attending a training course in Paris, and one evening, to relax I watched ‘Soylent Green‘, a classic science fiction film. If you’ve not seen it, I recommend it, and go and watch it …

So, what I’d like to know is, what is your most horrifying discovery from your work with SQL Server?

We all like to read stories of other people’s misfortunes and, in some ways they help to make us better people by learning from them. Hopefully, there is nothing as bad as Charlton Heston’s discovery, but there may be in its own way.

A couple of extra thoughts for motivational thinking…

Soylent Brown – You did a post, Great Job!!

Soylent Orange – You did a post, it made me wince!

Soylent Green  – You did a post, it made me wince, and it included some T-SQL.

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 communityforums 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 #33 – Trick Shot

Invitation and roundup from Mike Fal.

For a while, I was in an amateur pool league.  No, not the one involving water and swimming, but where you try to sink balls into pockets.  It was a lot of fun and is a challenge both for your motor skills as well as your strategy.  I still shoot from time to time, as well as hang out with my old pool buddies.

One thing guys would get into is trick shots.  Two and three rail bank shots, masse shots, or jumping the cue ball to hit the target.  Most of these shots weren’t tournament legal, but they were fun to try and nice to impress the ladies.  More than that, they were a tool to teach you the physics of your pool game.  You could see how throw and English could affect your shot, or how balls would behave after impact.

Just like so many other things I do in my life, the trick shot lessons translate over to SQL Server.  How many times have we built something neat or puzzled out a particular bit of logic that, while it may not have been particularly useful, taught us about how SQL Server behaves.  This month’s T-SQL Tuesday is all about this and the assignment is two-fold:

  1. Show us a cool trick or process you developed, maybe a DMV you used or some reporting logic you created.  It doesn’t have to be useful, just something that you thought was pretty neat.
  2. Tell us what you learned from this trick.  Is it something about an oddity in SSRS?  Maybe with the query processor?  Whatever you did, tell us how it gave you insight in to how SQL Server works.

T-SQL Tuesday #32 – A Day in the Life

Invitation 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 11th or Thursday July 12th, 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.

T-SQL Tuesday #31 – Logging

Invitation from Aaron Nelson.

I’m excited to be hosting this month’s T-SQL Tuesday.  This month we’re talking about logging.  Logging comes in many form and fashions.  If you think about it, when you go to the grocery store with at big list, Do you put the items in the cart and then check them off the list?  If so, isn’t that a kind of write-ahead log?

I point that out because I don’t want anyone to constrain themselves to talking about logging within just SQL Server.  Please bring your ideas for file transfers, report generating, performance gathering, uptime monitoring and the like.  But don’t stop there!  This is an open invite to anyone that does anything in the SQL Server community.

If Karla Landrum ( blog | twitter ) wants to explain to us how on Earth she keeps track of all these SQL Saturdays around the world, that’s logging!  If Tim Radney ( blog | twitter ) wants to tell us how he makes sure he keeps in touch with all of the chapters he’s responsible for as a PASS Regional Mentor, that’s logging!

How you keep track of blog ideas, white papers you read, or however it is you life-hack *your* SQL world: please share it with us!