Voice of the DBA

Category: Blog

Speaker Guidance: Save Your Data
The PASS organization (and likely SQL Saturday) are shutting down their sites on 15 Jan, 2021. This means that potentially lots of links and data will disappear.

There are people in the community saving some of the data, and images. I’m hoping to put some of those in an archive that will live on and remain accessible, but for speakers, the links to events are part of our living CV. It may be important for you to capture some of this.

I’ve got a few things for you to do, especially those of you that are Microsoft (or other) MVPs, or nominated. I have thoughts here on image schedules and your living CV.

Note that you might not care about this, or you might not be sure. However, once the data is gone, it’s gone, so you might want to get it now and decide on its value later.

Sections here:
Image Schedules

I should have done this years ago, as some events (like DevConnections), get rid of their site for particular events and only show the schedule for the next one. As a matter of fact, they’re done.

For SQL Saturdays, you can get the schedule for an event on their page. For example, I spoke at SQL Sat 997 – Salt Lake City. I can get the schedule from an image capture:

Or at the bottom, there is an export to PDF. I recommend you save these, then upload the image/pdf to someplace you can link to from your CV.

Going forward, I’d continue to do this, and even take pictures on a marquee when we get back to live events.

Speaking CV

I track lots of activity for my Microsoft MVP award, but I also keep a Speaking CV I can point to from my resume. For me, this is a static page on my WordPress blog that I update, but I separate things by year and include the events and links.

Typically I link to a schedule page for an event, but these will all be broken, or some of them.

One of my tasks this winter will be to go capture some of the visual evidence of these, if I can. That way I can preserve things.

One other note is that the first day back to work after I speak, I usually update this and ensure it’s current.

Preserving SQL Sat Data

For posterity, or maybe just for me, I was curious what activity I’d had. If I log into the PASS site, I can go to My SQL Saturday, and see the events where I submitted things. If you’re curious, go here, and then you know where to go save an image.

The footer gets in the way, but you can copy/paste and resort this all if you need to.
December 18, 2020
Daily Coping 18 Dec 2020

I started to add a daily coping tip to the SQLServerCentral 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.

Today’s tip is to buy and extra item and donate it to a local food bank.

The food bank has always been important to me. I used to volunteer with my kids, helping them understand how lucky they are and how others may not be. Every year, I’ve tried to donate some supplies to either of those close to me, though probably not often enough.

This year, with the strange world we live in and fewer trips, I know there are plenty of people in need. I decided to do some extra donations to the local bank. Rather than give them some food items, I purchased some local gift cards and gave them. The food bank uses these for perishable items, like milk, eggs, etc.

I also set a reminder to do this regularly.

December 18, 2020
Daily Coping 17 Dec 2020

I started to add a daily coping tip to the SQLServerCentral 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.

Today’s tip is to be generous and feed someone with food, love, or kindness today.

My love language is Acts of Service, and I do this often, preparing things for the family when I can. Recently I asked my son what he’d want for dinner. He comes down once or twice a month from college for a few days, and I try to ensure he enjoys the time.

His request: ramen.

I put this together for him, and the family, last Friday night.

The sushi I bought, because that’s something he enjoys, and I’m not nearly as good as some local chefs.

December 17, 2020
No Scalars with JSON_QUERY–#SQLNewBlogger
Another post for me that is simple and hopefully serves as an example for people trying to get blogging as #SQLNewBloggers.

I started to dig into JSON queries recently, and as I continued to experiment with JSON, this struck me as strange. Why is there a NULL in the result?

The path looks right. This appears to be somewhere I ought to get a result back. As I looked up the JSON_QUERY documentation, and it says I get an object or array back. I’d somewhat expect that position, while containing a single value, could be seen as an object of

{“setter”}

The fact that I need to know I have a single value here seems like poor design. If the document changes, perhaps someone might enter this:
```
DECLARE @json NVARCHAR(1000)
     = N'
  {  "player": {
              "name" : "Sarah",
              "position" : "setter, DS"
             },
    "team":"varsity" 
  }

';
```
In this case, a JSON_VALUE would fail, while a JSON_QUERY wouldn’t work in the first example above. This means that I need to modify my code based on documents.

I don’t like this, but I need to know this, so if you work with JSON, make sure you know how the functions work.

SQLNewBlogger

While writing the previous post, I changed one of the function calls and got the NULL. I had to fix things for the other post, but I kept the query and then spent about 10 minutes writing this one to show a little thought into the language.

You can easily take something you are confused about, made a mistake doing, or wonder about and write your own post.
December 16, 2020