Voice of the DBA

Author: way0utwest

Daily Coping Tip 11 Nov 2022
Today’s coping tip is to make a list of new things you want to do before the end of the year.

Hmm, definitely some things to do, but what’s new? I’m not great with new as I like routine and familiarity. Here are a few aims:
- visit Portugal (planned)
- sand and finish a cheese knife
- try a new restaurant for date night
- new approach to coaching, asking more questions rather than telling setters what to do
I started to add a daily coping tip to the SQL Server Central newsletter and to the Community Circle, which is helping me deal with the issues in the world. I’m adding my responses for each day here. All my coping tips are under this tag.
November 11, 2022
Thursday is #sqlkilt Day

At the PASS Data Community Summit, Thursday is the day when the Women in Technology (WIT) luncheon takes place. This is an event I’ve come to enjoy as I do feel it is harder for women to deal not only with all the things I do inside of a company, but they also have the sexual overtones. Often it’s not harassment, but in the US, too many men view women very differently, allowing their hormones to affect their judgment.

It’s also #sqlkilt day. This was something started for men to show their support for women at the event. I’ve worn a kilt numerous times, including the first year when only 4 of us were in kilts.

I’m looking forward to the 2022 WIT panel, which has some friends on it, where they’ll talk about many of the same challenge that all of us face, but with their own perspectives. I’m double committed that day (or maybe triple), but I’m going to swing by and listen as much as I can.

Hope to see you there, and in a kilt (if you’re a man).

November 10, 2022
Daily Coping 10 Nov 2022

Today’s coping tip is to respond to a difficult situation in a different way.

There are plenty of difficult situations I find myself in, some of which create lots of emotion. Anger, fear, frustration, and more.

One thing I tried to do recently was accept the emotion and then let it go. I didn’t express it back to the person and instead made an internal effort to acknowledge there was something I didn’t like and then take a moment. I stepped back and tried to re-examine the situation as if it were happening to someone else.

I asked myself what role should I play, what was the intent of the other party, what part of the situation am I really responsible for? Doing this helped me to realize that while my emotions were valid, they would have had me become defensive or short and overreact to the situation rather than just focus on my part and my role. I learned some of this from Doing Hard Things.

Hard to describe without giving details, and I don’t want to disclose who/what/where as it’s private. The main thing was making an attempt to respond differently to a situation than I had in the past.

I started to add a daily coping tip to the SQL Server Central newsletter and to the Community Circle, which is helping me deal with the issues in the world. I’m adding my responses for each day here. All my coping tips are under this tag.

November 10, 2022
Select All in a Power BI Slicer–#SQLNewBlogger

One of the things I’ve been working on this year is a Power BI report for the kids I coaco in volleyball. As a part of this, I want to be able to show all kids, or a few kids, in relation to each other.

This post covers enabling this for a Slicer on a report.

Another post for me that is simple and hopefully serves as an example for people trying to get blogging as #SQLNewBloggers. Here are some hints to get started.

Adding the Slider

I have a basic report with a line graph. It looks like this once I’ve added in the value to capture at the Y, the date as the X, and the player as the legend.

I’ll add a slicer to the report and drop the players in there. I see the players, but I don’t have an easy way to select all of them.

I can select 1, but if I select another, the report changes. I can CTRL+select to get multiple players, but I want to easily get everyone.

I knew this was possible because I’d seen other reports show this. I didn’t see anything obvious, so I actually had to search the docs and found a note that explained how to enable this.

If I click the slicer, I can then select the Format option on the right, which is the center icon at the top of the visuals pane. You can see the tool tip below.

Once I do this, I need to expand the Slicer Settings and then the Selection area, as shown here.

Now I want to click the “Show Select All” button.

Now my slicer show a Select All at the top.

Easy.

I found that when I have a few slicers, which I wanted for this report, it was easy to add them all, then do the formatting for one. If I clicked another slicer, I was in the same format spot and could enable SELECT ALL for the next one. For me, I actually had 3 slicers, so it was nice to format them all very quickly to add this option.

SQL New Blogger

This is a really basic post, but it was also something that I didn’t intuitively figure out. I had to research a bit and look around. That’s the skill that many employers need and want.

This also might trigger someone to ask me about Power BI and what I know, which gives me the chance to talk about the learning and experimenting I’ve done.

You could do this as well. It took me about 15-20 minutes to grab screen shots and write this.

November 9, 2022