Tag: 2014

T-SQL Tuesday #052 – Argue Against a Popular Opinion

Invitation and roundup from Michael J. Swart (check out his drawing this month.

Your writing assignment for March 2014 is to

pick a popular opinion and argue against it.

… or at least qualify it. Given any issue, people drift to two kinds of crowds. There’s the “it depends” crowd and there’s the “never ever” crowd. We tend to fall in with one crowd or the other.  This month, I want you to find an “never ever” issue and argue for it (or conversely, find a “always” issue and argue against it).

I wonder how this month will go. It takes guts to go against common wisdom.

You don’t necessarily have to argue against a universal opinion, but it should at least be popular. I think that your choice of opinions is practically limitless:

  • Bob Duffy had a list of 10 interview questions that annoy SQL professionals. With some great topics there including GUIDs, Cursors, and heaps.
  • Google results for “SQL.Server should.never”
  • Fair’s fair. Here are the results for “SQL.Server should.always”
  • Does anyone want to have a shot at redeeming Microsoft Access?
  • Foreign Keys, SchmoreignKeys.
  • Check it out. SQL Server supports varbinary(max)! Ideal for json documents and xml documents (or both!)
  • Shrinking databases and/or log files (because of the fragmentation! God save us all from fragmentation!)

Here’s a little secret. This month’s topic is not for you. It’s for the readers. It’s a chance for you to give them a more nuanced understanding of a topic that they may not have given a lot of thought up until now. I’m a little curious myself.

T-SQL Tuesday #051 – Place Your Bets

Invitation and roundup from Jason Brimhall.

All bets on the table please.  This is the last call for bets, no new bets will be allowed.

This marks the 51st invitation for TSQL Tuesday.  This also marks what should have been the month of the first SQL Saturday event in Las Vegas.  But the house lost on that event so it was pushed out to April 5th.

With that loss and the subsequent push, it is time for you to put on your Poker Face.  This month TSQL Tuesday is taking on a Vegas theme.  I want to know about the gambles within your databases or not within your databases that you have seen over the years.

When has somebody (a CTO, Developer, Business User) placed a bet that was far too risky in your opinion?  What kinds of gambles have been parlayed into catastrophes that could have been easily avoided?  Once you are all in on these dogs and the aggregate limit has been reached, I want to know the handicap and how you fixed it.

Here are some examples.

  1. I encountered a Sharepoint database server that had a 940 GB error log.  The log was locked by antivirus software and couldn’t be cycled.  Upon getting that resolved, I found the log was growing at about 500 MB an hour.  There was a problem with Sharepoint talking to Active Directory.
  2. A developer wrote a cursor that ran for 36 hours.  Upon investigation, the cursor was re-written into a set-based script that ran in 42 seconds.
  3. A 3rd party hosting service stopped SQL Server Services and deleted the system databases.  The line on this bet was that they would have less than 15 minutes of outage and minimal revenue loss.  The reality in this case was a sucker bet.  They lost 4hrs of uptime and nearly 2 million dollars for the client.

I will leave it to you to offer up tokes and/or to discuss any trends this may have revealed to you while producing the rundown.  Have fun with it and remember, with databases a big bet is not necessarily worth the risk.

T-SQL Tuesday #050 – Automation

Invitation from Hemanth D.

Automation plays a huge part in our lives and the DBA profession is no so different. A couple of years ago this topic was shared by Pat Wright. I would like to revisit this again and see how much of our approach has changed.

You could write about, what options you would consider when automating something? Where do you draw the line? What are our preferred tools for automation? T-SQL, PowerShell, VBScript or Batch files(?) or maybe just share something that you automated in the last couple of years.