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Daily Coping Tip

For many of you out there working in a new way, I'm including a thought of the day on how to cope in this challenging time from The Action for Happiness Coping Calendar. My items will be on my blog, feel free to share yours.

Contact a neighbor, friend, or family and offer to help.

Taking Stock of Your Career

We're almost a quarter into the new year. Think about this statement: "Imagine you lose your job tomorrow.  What would you like your next job to look like?  Start acquiring the skills for your desired next job today!"

That's a quote from Jan 2, when I saw someone talking about their struggles. It was a statement that resonated with me, and it's one that I think everyone should be thinking about on a regular basis. Not worried or concerned about losing your job, but more, are you moving your career forward in some way that's a) valuable to your company, and b) valuable to someone else.

Both of those are important. Certainly you want to deliver value to your current employer. That's why they pay you and keep you around. Being skilled in your position is good, and improving that skill matters. This could keep you employed, and perhaps until you retire. That's my plan, and I continue to work on skills that will help me make this job the last full-time job I'll have have.

I feel confident in this plan, and I think I do a good job for Redgate. Some of the skills I work regularly on might help me with work elsewhere, but many are likely specific to this role. I don't know that I could find this same type of job again at another company, but if I did need or decide to change jobs, I'd need other skills.

That is one of those things that keeps me learning and moving forward. I dig into various technologies, trying to better understand how they work, and thinking about where I might use them. I might not need them in my current role, and they may not be useful at Redgate, but they do ensure that I am building some skills that someone else might find valuable.

I see lots of people that feel stuck in their jobs, and without support to grow and learn from their company. They struggle to find time and energy to learn about the cloud or AI or containers or anything else. I get that. Life is busy and hard, and (hopefully) you have plenty outside of work to occupy yourself.

Take a minute and read that quote above. Now imagine you need a new job. Do you want to try and update your resume tomorrow and hope you have some current, modern skills that lots of companies need? Or do you want to hope someone values your experience already? Those aren't bad plans, but maybe having a few new tricks you can talk about, things you've started to learn about, is a plan worth considering.

Steve Jones - SSC Editor

Join the debate, and respond to today's editorial on the forums

Redgate SQL Change Automation
 
 Featured Contents

Analyzing Formula 1 results in R

Thomas Hütter from SQLServerCentral.com

Using R to scrape data from the web, prepare and visualize it

Making SQL Server Function Changes Backwards Compatible

Steve Jones - SSC Editor from SQLServerCentral

 

Tagging SQL Server Changes in SQL Monitor

Additional Articles from SQLServerCentral

How to use RAISERROR() in T-SQL to send annotations to SQL Monitor, so you can observe the direct impact of application tasks, or server changes, on the SQL Server metrics.

From the SQL Server Central Blogs - Containers and DevOps

Grant Fritchey from The Scary DBA

Over the last couple of years, one of these single most exciting technologies to come out around the Data Platform has been containers. You may not see them change...

From the SQL Server Central Blogs - Save the Dates for Redgate Streamed

Steve Jones - SSC Editor from The Voice of the DBA

We’ve got three days of online content coming your way from Redgate on Apr 1-3. There is a great lineup, and you can register for each day here: Wed,...

 

 Question of the Day

Today's question (by Steve Jones - SSC Editor):

 

SQLCMD Output

I am working on a SQLCMD script. I have this written:
:setvar DirectoryRootPath "C:\Users\Documents\Log.txt"

:connect PlatoSQL2017

XXX

select * FROM dbo.Logger
What do I put in place of the XXX to get the data from the table into the file specified in my variable?

Think you know the answer? Click here, and find out if you are right.

 

 

 Yesterday's Question of the Day (by Steve Jones - SSC Editor)

Still More Memory Optimized Table Limitations

If I run DBCC CHECKTABLE on a table in a SQL Server 2017 database that is Memory-optimized, what happens?

Answer: The command fails and an error is returned

Explanation: The DBCC CHECKTABLE command is not supported for MOT tables and returns an error. Ref:

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 2017 - Development
Programmatically create SSRS report as PDF - I would really appreciate some guidance on how to get vb code working in a SSRS report.  Please refer vb code at end of posting. The code has been added to Custom Code (Report Properties, Code) and the code is called from a Text Box expression in the report.  I have created a SSRS Data […]
How to check if a particular table is being used right now? - I am completing an SP that will do massive deletes based on certain criteria from a dozen of tables. On average each table is tens of millions of rows, no permanent or tuned indexes on it (it is a staging-swap kind of tables,  temporary transactional data holders) but occasionally heavy selects can be run against […]
Running Total - I have a table that captures rainfall data approx every 10 minutes. I want to calculate a sort of a running total of the Last Hour's Rainfall and the Last 8 Hours Rainfall by Time. Last Hour's Rainfall = Sum(PrecipitationAmount) for the previous 60 minutes (PrecipitationMinutes is the number of minutes over which the PrecipitationAmount […]
SQL Server 2016 - Development and T-SQL
Need some help getting info of people logged in, but from the POV of NON-Sysadm - I modified a proc that returns a result set of all user emails to the application in question, with one column that displays a sundial if that user is logged in. I did this by doing a left outer join to sys.dm_exec_sessions Left join sys.dm_exec_sessions b on login_name = Su.name and program_name like '
I was asked to get rid of this Dynamic SQL for performance purposes. - Is it REALLY possible to bypass the @Where_Clause variable and make the below SQL non-dynamic? This is a statement from an SP that receives the below 5 parameters and dynamically builds the WHERE clause from them. I don't think it is possible NOT TO USE DYNAMIC SQL HERE, but double-checking with you guys. Thanks. -- […]
Need explanation for below query what it does -   @Date1 = '20150630' DATEADD(m,6, @Date1) < DATEADD(m,-12,GETDATE())   Ignore this, i got the answer after validating.
Administration - SQL Server 2014
SQl Stored Procedure - View Tuning - Hi, We have a stored procedure which calling view which contains bunch of tables in sql 2014 and 2017 and it's slow. View contains roughly 100K records. I was looking view and based on joins and where clause i have created index but nothing gain as performance it's same. I tried following: Created Index based […]
SQL Server 2012 - T-SQL
Concatenating to a string - I am trying to concatenate values into one string value and what i have so far is progress, but I want to encapsulate my variables with single quotes. The below gives me e.g. Karen,Cox,Oakland,MN,95573 when what I need is 'Karen','Cox','Oakland','MN','95573': p.firstname + ',' + p.lastname + ',' + i.city + ',' + t.stateAbbrveation + ',' […]
SQL Server 2019 - Administration
Gauging Performance Improvement after removing the unused indexes - Hi All, Removed some of the unused indexes. But, how to identify the performance improvement? Is there anyway to generate any metrics and giving that the managers?   Regards
SQL Server 2019 - Development
PowerBI Report Builder - can it use/declare variables? - In SSRS, creating your own variables for use within your report is trivial... did MSFT leave this out of PowerBI Report Builder? In SSRS, I could create a dataset, and create a variable, and set the value using an aggregate for example (like a count of records in a dataset). I'm trying to do the […]
Ensuring a randomly generated number is always 8 digits - Hi there   I have inherited a piece of code which generates an Activation Code based on a seeded value as follows select cast (round(rand(31303258 * rand(DATEPART(millisecond,GETDATE()))) * 100000000,0) as int) where 31303258  is the seed or another 8 digit number   Now what I have noticed is that not all the time, a 8 […]
Reporting Services
Programmatically create SSRS report as PDF - I would appreciate some guidance on how to get vb code working in a SSRS report.  Please refer vb code at end of posting. The code has been added to Custom Code (Report Properties, Code) and the code is called from a Text Box expression in the report.  I have created a SSRS Data Source […]
SSRS 2016
SSRS 2016 - force page break - Hello, How it is possible to dynamically force a page break? for example: if the final page is on pagenumber say number 9 then have a page break before this page? Thank you
Integration Services
View package that has been deployed - First an explanation just to see if I am going about this the right way   I have a package that i've created using VS 2017 If  run it from VS2107 i.e. locally, it works fine   I've created a SQL Agent job Now, if I deploy it via SSMS i.e. through deploy project in […]
SSIS & Azure SQL database - Hi , I have an on-premise SSIS package which connects to SQL Server database(Source). On connecting source using onpremise SSIS need to connect Azure SQL database , after connecting Azure SQL database need to truncate the stage table first and insert the source data. On success of source data to destination table (stage table), need […]
 

 

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