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Question of the Day

Finding Marks

The Voice of the DBA

Multiple Display Productivity

It seems that when I travel to offices these days, it's standard for most desk setups to have two monitors. I think all the desks at Redgate have a docking station and two monitors for people to use. They also convert to standing desks, which is handy. I have a standing desk that I use regularly, and it's nice to have that option when I visit an office. At a number of customer sites, I've seen similar setups, sometimes with laptop/monitor lifts instead of desks that rise.

Recently I saw a docking station announced that can support four monitors. I wonder how many of you want, need, or use more than two monitors. While there is often a standard in offices, since many of us work part or full-time at home, perhaps you have a different setup. Maybe you have one or two large monitors instead of 3 or 4 smaller ones. I'd certainly be interested to know if any of you have more than 4 monitors.

I run three 24" monitors on my desk. When I go to an office and use a docking station, I can use my laptop as a third, though the resolution gets a little funny. If I were there for any length of time, I might try to reconfigure the laptop to work with the lid closed. Maybe that's a chore for the next trip. At home, however, I usually have SQL Server Central and writing tools on one monitor, Chrome with lots of tabs as my main workspace for research and general work, and Outlook/Spotify on a third monitor. That lets me focus on one monitor most of the time glancing at another one for reference or copy/paste work.

I tried four monitors in a 2x2 configuration at one point, but I didn't like looking up and down. Even now, I often really use two monitors, with side glances at a third one at times. I have been tempted to get 2 larger monitors (27-30" range), but I'm not sure I would be more productive and not sure it's worth spending the money for no real benefit I can perceive.

I've seen some neat setups in people's offices. I see some developers using vertical monitors, though I haven't found that to be ergonomic for me. I seem to have too many long lines of code or text. I see some people using a laptop with one monitor, and I've seen some friends who are creative with videos/live streaming that use more than four monitors.

I don't know I have met anyone that has a gaming chair/monitor setup, but I'm sure someone out there has bought or built something like that. If you have, or you think you've got a cool setup, let me know.

Steve Jones - SSC Editor

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Featured Contents

Identifying Customer Buying Pattern in Power BI - Part 2

Farooq Aziz from SQLServerCentral

In this article, we develop the Power BI DAX formula for basket analysis. It is the technique used in retail industry for market based analysis.

Database Subsetting and Data Extraction

Additional Articles from SimpleTalk

Let’s start by defining a subset and why you would require a data subset? When dealing with the development, testing and releasing of new versions of an existing production database, developers like to use their existing production data.

From the SQL Server Central Blogs - DBA and Developer: Allies or Adversaries?

Rohit Garg from MSSQLFUN

In the expansive landscape of software development, the relationship between Database Administrators (DBAs) and Developers has been a subject of intrigue, debate, and occasional drama. Do they collaborate harmoniously...

From the SQL Server Central Blogs - Building a Docker image with Docker Build Cloud

dbafromthecold@gmail.com from The DBA Who Came In From The Cold

In a previous blog post we went through how to build a Docker container image from a remote (Github) repository. Here we’re going to expand on that by actually...

The Phoenix Project

Additional Articles from SQLServerCentral

In this newly updated and expanded edition of the bestselling The Phoenix Project, co-author Gene Kim includes a new afterword and a deeper delve into the Three Ways as described in The DevOps Handbook.

Question of the Day

Today's question (by Steve Jones - SSC Editor):
	Finding Marks
I have marked a few transactions in my code. How can I find out which marks were stored in a transaction log?
Think you know the answer? Click here, and find out if you are right.

Yesterday's Question of the Day (by Alessandro Mortola)

The "ORDER BY" clause behavior

Let’s consider the following script that can be executed without any error on both SQL Sever and PostgreSQL.

We define the table t1 in which we insert three records:

create table t1 (id int primary key, city varchar(50));

insert into t1 values (1, 'Rome'), (2, 'New York'), (3, NULL);

If we execute the following query, how will the records be sorted in both environments?

select city

from t1

order by city;

Answer: Sql Server: NULL - New York - Rome *** PostgreSQL: New York - Rome - NULL

Explanation: In SQL Server, Null values are always treated as the lowest possible values. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/t-sql/queries/select-order-by-clause-transact-sql?view=sql-server-ver16 In PostgreSQL, the NULL FIRST and NULLS LAST options can be used to determine whether nulls appear before or after non-null values in the sort ordering and by default, null values sort as if larger than any non-null value. https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/queries-order.html

Discuss this question and answer on the forums

Database Pros Who Need Your Help

Here's a few of the new posts today on the forums. To see more, visit the forums.

SQL Server 2016 - Administration

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SQL Server 2016 - Development and T-SQL

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SQL Server 2019 - Administration

client_app_name is empty in Extended Events output but present in sp_who2 - I'm tracing activity on one database and would like to include the client_app_name in the output. However, for *some* applications, this information is blank. However, if I run sp_who2 at the same time, I can see the ProgramName column is populated. Is there somewhere else that extended events stores this information or is it just […]

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SQL Server 2019 - Development

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SQL Azure - Administration

Aligning Compatibility Version Strategy - I have joined a new project, where the business uses Azure SQL Hyperscale for production. I have noticed that some Prod environments have compatibility levels set to 150, but some - 140. Same applies to Dev / Test SQL 2022 environments. I have been given a task to come up with a strategy on how […]

azure synapse analytics - Dears, Hope this message finds you well I did not see in this foruns anything related with synapse, hence, if you don't mind I will add my questions here. Maybe you can help me In my company (for which I was now contracted as IT architect) I can across something which seems unusual to me […]

Amazon AWS and other cloud vendors

AWS RDS for SQL Server - Backup to/Restore from s3 - Multiple Account Scenario - Hi All, I need a sanity check, and hoping someone here can provide it.... Environment: Prod Instance - AWS ec2 instance running SQL Server (2022) in "Prod Account" s3 Bucket in "Backups Account" Dev Instance - AWS ec2 instance running SQL Server (2022) in "Dev Account" Use Case: Need to be able to execute weekly […]

Reporting Services

Report definition has an invalid target namespace - I'm hoping someone here has encountered this before and was able to fix it. I've got a client with SQL Server 2014, they also use SSRS and asked me to create a new report to get automatically run every week. I created the report on my computer using Report Designer but when they tried to […]

General

How to create a baseline using counters to analyze server performance? - I am currently working on creating a baseline for our server, using various counters to analyze performance. The server exclusively hosts SQL Server. Could anyone here share their experiences or methodologies on how to create such a baseline and use it for performance analysis?

Integration Services

Query about GAC (Global Assembly Cache) - Hi everyone, So I have a SSIS package that performs some importing/exporting from MySQL database. This SSIS package uses code written in Script Task C#. To make connectivity to MySQL server, I have used MySql.Data Nuget package. When I installed this Nuget package I had to manually add "MySql.Data.dll" file into GAC otherwise there were […]

SQL Server 2022 - Administration

Import and Export wizard stuck on Guest user - I'm getting a error when using the Import and Export wizard to copy tables between a remote database and a local database using the Microsoft OLE DB Provider for SQL Server as Data Source. The remote DB uses SQL Server authentication and the local DB uses Windows authentication. Regardless of which database is the Source […]

SQL Server 2022 - Development

More fun with Recursive CTEs - Instead of dealing with courses this time, I'm trying to sort out how to model a recipe problem. (It's bread, so it's not crazy complex.) Oh wait, here... have some table definitions: USE [Bakery] GO /* Sorry, this started in Abscess */ CREATE TABLE [dbo].[Ingredient]( [IngredientID] [int] IDENTITY(1,1) NOT NULL, [IngredientName] [varchar](255) NOT NULL, [UnitPrice] […]

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