| The Complete Weekly Roundup of SQL Server News by SQLServerCentral.com | Hand-picked content to sharpen your professional edge |
| What Counts for a DBA: Skill Practice makes perfect:” right? Well, not exactly. The reality of it all is that this saying is an untrustworthy aphorism. I discovered this in my “younger” days when I was a passionate tennis player, practicing and playing 20+ hours a week. No matter what my passion level was, without some serious coaching (and perhaps a change in dietary habits), my skill level was never going to rise to a level where I could make any money at the sport that involved something other than selling tennis balls at a sporting goods store. My game may have improved with all that practice but I had too many bad practices to overcome. Practice by itself merely reinforces what we know and what we can figure out naturally. The truth is actually closer to the expression used by Vince Lombardi: “Perfect practice makes perfect.” So how do you get to become skilled as a DBA if practice alone isn’t sufficient? Hit the Internet and start searching for SQL training and you can find 100 different sites. There are also hundreds of blogs, magazines, books, conferences both onsite and virtual. But then how do you know who is good? Unfortunately often the worst guide can be to find out the experience level of the writer. Some of the best DBAs are frighteningly young, and some got their start back when databases were stored on stacks of paper with little holes in it. As a programmer, is it really so hard to understand normalization? Set based theory? Query optimization? Indexing and performance tuning? The biggest barrier often is previous knowledge, particularly programming skills cultivated before you get started with SQL. In the world of technology, it is pretty rare that a fresh programmer will gravitate to database programming. Database programming is very unsexy work, because without a UI all you have are a bunch of text strings that you could never impress anyone with. Newbies spend most of their time building UIs or apps with procedural code in C# or VB scoring obvious interesting wins. Making matters worse is that SQL programming requires mastery of a much different toolset than most any mainstream programming skill. Instead of controlling everything yourself, most of the really difficult work is done by the internals of the engine (written by other non-relational programmers…we just can’t get away from them.) So is there a golden road to achieving a high skill level? Sadly, with tennis, I am pretty sure I’ll never discover it. However, with programming it seems to boil down to practice in applying the appropriate techniques for whatever type of programming you are doing. Can a C# programmer build a great database? As long as they don’t treat SQL like C#, absolutely. Same goes for a DBA writing C# code. None of this stuff is rocket science, as long as you learn to understand that different types of programming require different skillsets and you as a programmer must recognize the difference between one of the procedural languages and SQL and treat them differently. Skill comes from practicing doing things the right way and making “right” a habit. Louis Davidson (@drsql) Join the debate, and respond to the editorial on the forums |
The Weekly News | All the headlines and interesting SQL Server information that we've collected over the past week, and sometimes even a few repeats if we think they fit. |
Vendors/3rd Party Products |
Phil Factor explains how to get started with Flyway on your laptop, by running migrations on SQLite databases, using PowerShell. |
Phil Factor brings us yet another lesson in Flyway and database migrations. Learn how to use PowerShell with Flyway to run SQL migration scripts that will build, fill and modify a PostgreSQL database. |
AI/Machine Learning/Cognitive Services |
Introduction In this article, we are going to disc... |
Administration of SQL Server |
In this olved stery the problem comes as a slow database restore. That’s what I was given, that’s all I have... |
In the previous articles of the SQL Server System Databases series, we considered the purpose of all SQL Server System databases coming as part of SQL Server installation and... |
A couple years ago in my Incident Safety Officer c... |
Analysis Services / BI on the MS Stack |
This article talks about the modern business intel... |
Azure SQL Managed Instance |
After many years working with different “flavours” of SQL server in Azure from its true PaaS form to SQL server in AKS (Azure Kubernetes Service) it’s time to look... The... |
Computing in the Cloud (Azure, Google, AWS) |
If you’ve ever been a DBA and seen the mess that you get with SQL Agent Jobs without a clean naming standard for your job schedules and job names... The... |
I need to blog more. Stupid being busy. Anyway, la... |
This article guides you for deploying your first SQL Server on Azure VM using the Azure portal. Introduction The infrastructure requirement might vary in different organizations, applications. Therefore, planning... |
When it comes to the cloud, developers will often ... |
In the same way as other query environments, Kusto... |
Conferences, Classes, Events, and Webinars |
Join Grant Fritchey and our panel of database professionals to learn how effective estate monitoring enables them to manage continually evolving environments, and intensifying data demands. |
A few years ago, I was approached by an organizer of a developer conference asking if I would be interested in presenting at their event. This was unusual at... |
This coming Friday the 13th (August 2021) is the first ever Dativerse virtual conference, hosted by our DataGrillen friends William and Benjamin. According to their site: We try to... |
We're thrilled to welcome Microsoft as the Premier Sponsor at this year's PASS Data Community Summit. The Microsoft team will be a fundamental part of the conference program and activities through educational sessions, product deep-dives and announcements, Microsoft-focused workshops, keynotes, and more. We're excited to continue this relationship in support of the global data community. |
Fun With PowerShell Logic Branching - if and switc... |
Database Design, Theory and Development |
You have a table that you want to add “created... |
DevOps and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) |
Here's why many DevOps teams are now considering G... |
ETL/SSIS/Azure Data Factory/Biml |
In this article, we will learn how to invoke an AP... |
I saw a note from Microsoft recently that they are trying to improve some of the support experiences for customers that are going through their docs. The idea is... The... |
Performance Tuning SQL Server |
Spare No Expense Over the years, there have been a... |
Off And On I spend a lot of time fixing queries li... |
PowerPivot/PowerQuery/PowerBI |
In this article, we are going to explore how to embed Power BI reports in Jupyter notebooks. Power BI is one of the most popular data visualization tools in... |
Can a Power BI Dataset be setup to refresh without... |
I’m only half-joking. Hear me out. If you’re f... |
Wow, it’s TSQL Tuesday again! Tjay Belt (blog|tw... |
For this month's T-SQL Tuesday, TJay Belt asks us ... |
Writing large datasets to SQL Server can be very slow using the DBI package with an odbc connection. |
This is a topic that comes up a lot for us as consultants and I realized recently that I have never blogged about it. Usually the question is something... |
This article will mention some of the most popular... |
The technique I will use in this blog can be used ... |
I have trouble with procedures that use SELECT *. They are often not “Blue-Green safe“. In other words, if a procedure has a query that uses SELECT * then I can’t change the underlying tables can’t change without causing some tricky deployment issues. |
Ugly. That’s what unsorted data looks like. We make data easy for the eyes by sorting them. And that’s what SQL ORDER BY is for. Use one or more... |
Grouping is an important feature that helps organi... |
Itzik Ben-Gan shows us a new function in Azure SQL Edge, DATE_BUCKET, explains some use cases, and gives us alternative syntax until it is supported in all SQL Server... |
I came across this example when preparing my CTE presentation a while back. Which produces the following output. The post Using a CTE in a Function to Split Up a... |
This article aims to provide various tricks that help to gain advanced T-SQL programming skills. Introduction In the last decade, organizations have started to generate data with incredible momentum.... |
The simplest of requests are often the most difficult to execute. For example, a finance team needs to know every time a customer did not invoice for 90 days... |
Virtualization and Containers/Kubernetes |
In this post I want to cover how I used Azure as i... |
Just some handy commands to use via kubectl. I found these useful for various reasons so hopefully you will too. Overview of our nodes. Pod information, remember from my... The... |
Last week I created the below with a dummy databas... |
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