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Daily Coping Tip

Send a positive message to someone you can’t be with

I also have a thread at SQLServerCentral dealing with coping mechanisms and resources. Feel free to participate.

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.

Desktop or Laptop for Remote Work

When I started working in a corporation, I was assigned a desktop. No choice of hardware and upgrades were extremely rare and limited. This was in the early 90s, and laptops were rare, and they were coveted by those that received them. I was lucky to get to use one when on call, to allow me to remotely dial in when we had issues. Yes, I dialed in after being paged.

Over time, laptops became more common, and as I began traveling for work, I had one full time. The last few years, I've depended on laptops while working for Redgate. I even ask for advice periodically when I look for a new one. Today I have two active laptops that I carry when (and if) I travel.

However, I also have a desktop. In fact, I've maintained a desktop all throughout my time at Redgate and use that for most of my daily work. I like the multiple screens, and I can't beat the multi-TBs of storage, lots of cores, tons of RAM, and more. I like my desktop, and I prefer using it.

This week I saw an article on the reasons why a desktop PC makes more sense than a laptop. With the move to more virtual, and solo work, does a laptop make sense? Certainly there is a tradeoff. Being able to move to a different room in your house if others are using the same space is helpful. Having kids pick up your laptop and leave it elsewhere is less helpful.

These days, I wonder how many of you feel? Some of you have dedicated office space, some do not. Some like the more powerful desktops, some prefer to flexibility of laptops. Some want to control their hardware, some want to just have a pre-assembled package.

This week, how do you feel? Do you like desktops or laptops more? Have you changed your mind through this pandemic? What about the future, will you change for your next machine?

Steve Jones - SSC Editor

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

 
 Featured Contents

Stairway to DAX and Power BI - Level 14: DAX CALCULATE() Function: The Basics

Bill Pearson from SQLServerCentral

Business Intelligence Architect, Analysis Services Maestro, eight-year Microsoft Data Platform MVP and author Bill Pearson introduces the DAX CALCULATE() function, discussing its syntax, basic uses and operation. He then provides hands-on exposure to CALCULATE(), focusing largely upon its most basic uses in evaluating an expression in a context that is modified by specified filters.

SQL Server Agent Job Monitoring for Last Execution

Additional Articles from MSSQLTips.com

In this article we continue our series of using PowerShell to monitor SQL Server by collecting the last run information for SQL Server Agent Jobs.

Free eBook: SQL Server Internals: In-Memory OLTP

Press Release from Redgate

In this free eBook, Kalen Delaney explains how Microsoft's 2016 In-memory OLTP engine works. In her book, learn how to use lock- and latch-free data structures to allow non-blocking data processing, and find out how to migrate existing tables to Hekaton.

From the SQL Server Central Blogs - Online certification exams are definitely different

DesertDBA from The Desert DBA

As you can tell from previous posts, I’ve taken a few Microsoft Certification exams here in 2020. As you may have also heard, there’s been this Coronavirus pandemic happening...

From the SQL Server Central Blogs - Understanding how to enable SQL Server Optimizer Hotfixes

John Morehouse from John Morehouse | Sqlrus.com

There are a number of knobs and switches that are available to database administrators that can be used to enable better performance.  There are three options in particular that...

 

 Question of the Day

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

 

Filtering the Dataframe in Python

I have a dataframe in Python, sales, that I created with the pandas library. I have a field in the dataframe called 'State'. I want to get only the rows from the dataframe that have a value of "New York" for the row. Which code should I run?

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)

The D in ACID

What does the D in ACID stand for when related to relational databases?

Answer: Durability

Explanation: The D in ACID is for Durability. This is that committed transactions are guaranteed in non-volatile memory. Ref: ACID - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACID#:~:text=In%20computer%20science%2C%20ACID%20(atomicity,errors%2C%20power%20failures%2C%20etc.

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
Unable to debug a sproc - I'm trying to debug an SP in visual studio 2019 (what a palava! bring back this ability in SSMS please!!) Anyways. I have created a connection to the DB and tested successfully. Now I add a script to the project and this contains my exec SPname code. Next I select execute with debugger and […]
SQL Server 2016 - Administration
Availability groups - licencing considerations - Hi all   I'm trying to my facts in a row before I go to managers with this one.   We have one copy of our production data (from the software vendor) on server A (I know, it's the only copy and I've been shouting about that forever). What we want to do is set […]
Folders in C:\Users - are they really needed? - I have some time on my hands (sadly) and am using some of it to clean up my computer. The computer in question runs Windows 7 (no, 'upgrading' to Windows 10 is not an option) and I have used it for many years. Over time, I have installed at least three versions of MS SQL, […]
SQL Server 2016 - Development and T-SQL
Column Level Collation Japanese_90_CI_AS_WS - Having issues getting the column level collation to function. The default collation of the database is SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS. Inserted the following characters below ??? into the table and render as ??? as expected. I altered the column collation to Japanese_90_CI_AS_WS and yet to get it to render properly. I am able to get the characters to […]
Is there a tool to automate SQL tuning and review? - I am looking for a tool that reviews and tunes SQL queries automatically. Does Microsoft or a 3rd party vendor have such a tool? Ideally such a tools could be used to automate this process fully. If it could perform standards checking that would be even better. Any ideas?
THROW vs RAISERROR with bubbling up - Hi all, I know THROW is newer and recommended but I'm wondering if one bubbles up and the other doesn't.  Specifically, let's say I have nested Try/Catch's and the error happens in the second one.  Which bubbles up?  Or does the Catch handle that? Thanks!
ALTER DATABASE Issue - Hello, I faced  very strange issue. When I try from management studio to put the specific database to RESTRICTED_MODE, the operation succeeded, but when I try to do it from the operation script, I receive a message : "Msg 5070, Level 16, State 2, Line 3 Database state cannot be changed while other users are […]
Simple query question - I'm new to SQL and I'm struggling to return a result set which I worked on for a long time: Basically, I am trying to count and include active accounts per day over a timeframe (@params determine the time frame window). But the result must specify per day the number of active accounts. My struggle […]
Simple cast question - This is for SQL Server 2016.  Table called tblTest has a column called TestNumber that is varchar(5).  I think this should work and does when I run it but I'm seeing references that it won't and can't figure out why.  Can anyone explain or am I reading misinformation?  Something about a conversion error but the […]
SQL Server 2019 - Administration
Mobile DBA Tool for Android - Has anyone used Brain Box SQL app for Android in the google play store? What do you think? I've been using it to connect remotely to my SQL Servers via VPN and have been able to monitor servers (processes, storage, backups) as well as kick off scheduled jobs after hours.  It sure beats lugging around […]
SQL Server 2019 - Development
Is there a version of SQL Server that does automatic SQL tuning? - Is there a version of SQL Server that does automatic SQL tuning? I am also looking for automatic index creation based on queries executed. I know the query store from SQL Server 2016. I am sure that many things have changed since 2016. Any suggestions?
Azure SQL - Handling JSON column in the table - Hi I want to convert table content which contain the json values in the columnin Azure SQL server. like below Country          state              json_value US               Alabama          {"name':"John","surname":"Don","age":45,} Canada       Toronto          {"name":"Mark","surname":"Bagwell","age":35,"Gender":"Male"} I need to convert the table details in query itself like below country                 state                      name              surname               age           Gender US                          Alabama              John                 Don                       45             NULL Canada                Toronto                 […]
SQL Azure - Development
Create a User in Azure SQL Database - I need to create a user in Azure SQL Database and map the user to a specific database. does anyone have the syntax to make this happen? The GUI is restricted and you cant do it as you would in SSMS on-prem as you cant view the properties. Also I am after a decent script […]
General Cloud Computing Questions
Career advancement in cloud - I am a SQL server administrator with 5 years of pure DBA experience. I am planning to get trained into cloud like Azure or AWS or any other cloud technology where there is a future growth. Can someone guide me which patch to take, is it Azure or AWS. Since i am an administrator i […]
Strategies and Ideas
Loading ODS strategies - Hi everyone, Just curious on others' approaches on this.  So I'm developing a data warehouse in pieces.  The approach I was thinking of taking is pulling in data from my numerous source systems unaltered into the Operational Data Store, then having my scrubbing and data quality processes put the good summarized data in the DW. […]
 

 

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