Tag: 2012

T-SQL Tuesday #028 – Jack of All Trades or Master of None

Invitation and summary from Argenis Fernandez.

I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve heard that phrase.

Are you specialized? On something? Or anything at all? Has that been a good or a bad thing? Why?

Are you the SQL guy at work? Or the one who does everything?

Do you code? And configure wireless routers at work also?

If you had to pick one thing to specialize on, what would it be?

Over the course of my career I’ve worn many many hats. I always felt I was doing fine, had a stable job, but wasn’t quite fond of my prospects for the future. Then a friend said that I should focus on one thing and be the best at it. And while I’m most certainly NOT the best at it, I’ve gotten progressively better on it, to the degree that I’ve been called an ‘Expert’ by some (hate that word!) – I’d rather be called ‘knowledgeable’. My career took off like a rocket after I specialized, and certainly choosing to focus on one thing (SQL Server, in my case) has been one of the best decisions I’ve ever made. I’ve also been careful of not forgetting my roots as a SysAdmin – and always try to keep up with changes on the Windows/SAN/Networking front, but not with the same level of intensity.

So, in this installment of T-SQL Tuesday I’d like to ask you to blog about your experience. Tell us why you specialized, or why you’d like to specialize. If you don’t think that specialization is a good thing, tell us why. Discuss. Argue your point(s).

T-SQL Tuesday #027 – Invitation to The Big Data Valentine’s Edition

Invitation and roundup from Steve Jones.

Big Data

godivaThe party falls on Valentine’s Day this month, and I thought a little notice would let you get your post done early, and then spend the day with your loved ones

Since the media has a love affair with Big Data right now, I thought this would make an interesting topic. Data is the lifeblood of our careers and of many organizations. Slowly governments, companies, and individuals are becoming aware of just how important data is to us, and as they do, they want more of it. More storage, more access, and more analysis.

That creates challenges for us as data professionals. We will have to learn to better manipulate, aggregate, summarize, and handle larger volumes of data in the future. I think this means we will have lots of employment in this area, and it means tremendous opportunity for those that learn to work with data well.

This month I want to hear what big data problems you’ve solved, or interesting ways of working with big data, challenges that you struggle with, or cool hardware tricks that mask the problems in your code.

Think big, and let us know how you work with Big Data.

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 | @sqlmental) resolutions, 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.