T-SQL Tuesday #141 - Work/Life Balance

Tue, 10 Aug 2021 21:15:00 -0400

This month TJay Belt asks us about managing work/life balance. With COVID this topic has gotten a lot of traction in various outlets. Everyone these days proclaims themselves an expert at balancing work and life. I claim no expertise, but I have learned painful lessons along the way in how not to achieve balance. I’ve stubbed my toes badly here and found myself deep in burnout territory. Each of the rules that follow serve as a facet of work/life boundaries for me. Some of the boundaries are more porous than others, but all of the rules work in this manner.

Rule #1 – After Hours E-mails Can Wait

I’ll admit this is a hard rule, and it can be a blurry line. I treat this as a very firm guideline, not a mandate. There are certain e-mails that...

T-SQL Tuesday #136 - Your Favorite Datatype (Or Least Favorite)

Tue, 09 Mar 2021 20:00:00 -0500

Brent Ozar put out a call for blogging about your data type of choice. This might be a favorite (or least favorite) datatype. Naturally, varchar(max) and nvarchar(max) are going to have their punishment, deservedly. The datatype I’m not so sure is going to be getting the bludgeoning it deserves is varbinary(max). Sure, there are valid uses for the data type, but having the potential for just shy of 2GB of binary LOB data stored in a database has some negative potentials. Let’s take a look at some of these pitfalls.

Varbinary, much like its data cousins varchar and nvarchar allow for the storage of variable length data. Unlike its cousins varchar and nvarchar, the presentation of the varbinary data to the client, is as one would expect, binary in form. The varbinary max length specification allows for storage...

T-SQL Tuesday #130 - Automating Your Stress Away

Tue, 08 Sep 2020 09:45:00 -0400

Approaching the long holiday weekend, I saw that Elizabeth Noble had posted a challenging T-SQL Tuesday post. I’ve always loved automation, and finding novel ways to save time in my day is quite rewarding. There has been one area that has eluded me, and with the sticking points that SQL Agent has around security, it doesn’t lend itself well to automation. If you add availability groups into the mix, the headache soon becomes a dull migraine that never really goes away. My challenge, find a way to source control and automate the deployment of SQL Agent jobs.

I set out with the following criteria for my automation solution:

A job should be a self-contained unit in source control.
1. Some solutions for this problem I had seen used post-deployment scripts that get messy and require complex logic to...

Paul's Offering to Mentor? Count Me In!

Sat, 15 Aug 2020 22:00:00 -0400

When I look at my career, I have found incredible success as a DBA and a fulfilling career in the field. While this has certainly been rewarding, I realize that I want to continue the progress that I have had. Navigating the career path from this point forward is less clear but offers a challenge that is no less fulfilling. This navigation is made considerably easier by having someone who has faced these challenges before and, importantly for me, is accomplished and willing to invest their time to see others have this same acheivement. Paul exemplifies these traits as a mentor and has a tremendous amount of knowledge, wisdom, and experience to offer. To be chosen by Paul as a mentee would be a tremendous honor that could help shape the next stage of my career.

As a potential mentee, I felt it extremely important to ask myself what I...

Intermittent Login Failures

Fri, 15 Nov 2019 21:30:00 -0500

Over the past several weeks I’ve been working on an issue that I think all IT professionals dread, an intermittent issue. The specific scenario in this case was that the application was experiencing an error code 17830 at random intervals. After working on and off on the issue I was able to work with a member of the team to identify an exact timestamp of one of the issues.

Once I had this event in hand something struck me that SQL Server since at least 2012 always has an extended event running on the server that writes to both a ring buffer and file. This combination will allow CSS to perform diagnostics around specific important event classes. I’ve used these in the past when approaching a server cold where monitoring tools are unavailable or not granular enough to begin diagnosing an issue but mostly for CPU and memory pressure.

When...

SQL Saturday Orlando 2019

Sat, 14 Sep 2019 10:00:00 -0400

At the end of last year I set an ambitious goal of speaking at all of upcoming SQL Saturday’s in the state of Florida in 2019. Orlando marks the 5th and final for this goal. As I look back on this goal I wanted to reflect on some lessons learned.

First, I can’t stress to myself and others how important an outline is when creating a presentation. Looking back at this year I thought that I had done a good job of this, but it became obvious after the first time I presented my material that I didn’t have my outline dialed in nearly well enough. For future presentations I’ll plan on spending a lot more time here before I even open PowerPoint.

Second, demo fails are a real thing. They happen to everyone, and I wanted to find a way to minimize this. When I presented the topic the...