Leaving aside, for a second, Freud’s psychoanalytical definitions, the term “ego” generally refers to a person’s sense of self, and their self-esteem. In casual usage, however, it usually appears in the adjectival form, “egotistical” (most often followed by “jerk”). You don’t need to be a jerk to be a DBA; humility is important. However, ego is important […]
2021-06-26
290 reads
Of all the valuable attributes of a DBA, from passion to humility to practicality, perhaps one of the most important attributes may turn out to be the most seemingly nebulous: foresight. According to Free Dictionary, foresight is the "perception of the significance and nature of events before they have occurred". Foresight does not come naturally to most people, as the […]
2021-05-15
314 reads
I started in the early days of SQL Server, when having a gigabyte of disk storage was unheard of, much less a gigabyte of RAM. My watch has more storage space than the mainframe we replaced with an early version of SQL Server years ago. The technical possibilities and amounts of data we are capable […]
2020-02-15
134 reads
An InfoWorld article from 2017 suggests that 80 percent of a data scientist’s job is cleaning and transforming data, and I believe this is probably only true for organizations that spend at least an average effort in designing and implementing their data storage. These persons who have trained to analyze data using complex math formulas […]
2020-02-01
187 reads
Recently, there was a prominent film director fired from directing an episode in a very entertaining and profitable movie franchise. His firing was for tweets he made that were in very bad taste. And bad doesn’t begin to cover it, they were about topics that were universally despicable. What made this interesting was not that […]
2018-09-10
62 reads
Recently, as I was doing some work for the upcoming PASS Summit, a question popped in my head: “Why am I doing this?” It reminded me of the time when I was young (and idealistic). I went to the leader of a non-profit group asked about making it my permanent vocation. The leader looked at […]
2018-07-30
77 reads
One of the greatest things that has arisen in the past 10 years or so is a veritable stream of great conferences for people to learn how to write better software, many of them low cost or even free. In the Data Platform community, we have had nearly 800 free SQL Saturday events around the […]
2018-06-18
49 reads
In order to be great, you need to have an idea what great is. A quote I use in every one of my database design presentations is by one of my non-technical inspirations, C. S. Lewis. The quote is from his book, An Experiment in Criticism. “There are no variations except for those who know […]
2018-02-26
46 reads
2017-08-28
129 reads
I hate deadlines. Really. I truly hate them. The problem is: they are usually unrealistic, often not much more than a wild guess. They restrict the amount of time that I can spend in preparation and research so that I can do things right; they squeeze the artistic quality out of my work as a […]
2017-05-01
52 reads
By Steve Jones
If someone is trying to convince you it’s not a pyramid scheme, it’s a...
By Steve Jones
I was looking back at my year and decided to see if SQL Prompt...
In the era of cloud-native applications, Kubernetes has become the default standard platform for...
Hi experts, I have a 3+ TB database on a 2019 sql server which...
Comments posted to this topic are about the item The North Star for the...
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Multiple Escape Characters
In SQL Server 2025, I run this code (in a database with the appropriate collation):
SELECT UNISTR('%*3041%*308A%*304C%*3068 and good night', '%*') AS 'A Classic';
What is returned? See possible answers