Category: Blog

  • Advice I Like: Fear and Imagination

    Fear is fueled by a lack of imagination. The antidote to fear is not bravery; it looks more like imagination – from Excellent Advice for Living

    What a neat way to look at things. Most of us have fear. I have fear all the time. I fear illness as I age (or injury), I fear failure at work, I have fear before new presentations. I do think that bravery is just pushing down your fear and continuing on in the face of it.

    I certainly don’t think brave people get rid of fear. Maybe they get used to it and it feels less impactful.

    However, I haven’t thought about imagination. Though, I do sometimes confront people’s concerns with advice or a suggestion to think it through. It seems often that people afraid of things have too much imagination. They consider, or assign a likelihood score to things that is too high. Most of the time the worst thing isn’t likely to happen, but we fear it.

    I do think that if you imagine positively, then perhaps you have less fear. If you look for the good, the opportunity, then you have less fear.

    I I’ve been posting New Words on Fridays from a book I was reading, however, a friend thought they were a little depressing. They should be as they are obscure sorrows. I like them because they make me think.

    To counter-balance those, I’m adding in thoughts on advice, mostly from Kevin Kelley’s book. You can read all these posts under the advice tag.

  • The Challenge of Implicit Transactions: #SQLNewBlogger

    I saw an article recently about implicit transactions and coincidentally, I had a friend get caught by this. A quick post to show the impact of this setting.

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

    The Scenario

    You run this code:

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    Everything looks good. I ran an insert and I see the data in the table. I’m busy, so I click “close” on the tab and see this.

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    I’ve gotten so used to these messages, and annoyed by them in SSMS, I click “No” to get rid of it and close the window.

    The Problem

    A short while later I open a query window to do something related and check my data. I don’t see it.

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    What happened? I had implicit transactions set. This might happen if you mis-click this dialog. Ths option is close to the ANSI_NULL_DFLT_ON option.

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    You could also, or someone could in your terminal (as a poor joke) run this:

    SET IMPLICIT_TRANSACTIONS ON

    In either case, this means that instead of that insert running as expected, it really behaves like this:

    BEGIN TRANSACTION

    INSERT dbo.CityName
    (
        CityName
    )
    VALUES
    (‘Parker’)

    If I don’t explicit commit (or click “Yes”) then this isn’t committed.

    Be wary of implicit transactions. It’s a setting that goes against the way many of us work and can cause lots of unexpected problems. This is a code smell I would never want in my codebase.

    SQL New Blogger

    When I ran into this twice in a week, I decided to spend 10 minutes writing this post. It’s a chance to explain something and give a recommendation. Something every employer wants.

  • Local LLM Models at SQL Saturday Boston 2025

    I’m starting a long trip at Boston this weekend. I’ll be there Saturday speaking, two sessions I think. At least one.

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    I’m excited for this session as I’ve had a good time playing with LLMs and hope I can make this interesting for the attendees.

    I got asked to also talk about the Data API Builder, but Sessionize doesn’t have that updated, so I’ll be double checking that session today.

    Hopefully I see you there. It’s a great schedule, with some talented speakers. There is also a precon from Brent on Friday.

    Register today and I’ll see you in the Boston area on Saturday.

  • Monday Monitor Tips: The Jobs Report

    A customer wanted a report they could email to their boss about jobs, something that showed failures. This isn’t hard to get in Redgate Monitor, though it is manual (for now). Here’s how to do this.

    This is part of a series of posts on Redgate Monitor. Click to see the other posts.

    The Estate View of Jobs

    Under the Estate menu item, there is an entry for jobs.

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    Click this and you get to the estate view of jobs. Here I see an overview, and I can click the scale in the upper right for day/week/month.

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    Below this I see the failed and successful job details, though only for the most recent execution. Otherwise this is a ton of data. Good to note that the 10 jobs that failed must have succeeded on a subsequent run.

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    There is a button to see the details. Click Export:

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    This downloads an Excel sheet of my jobs. There is a summary tab of the status with some details by day.

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    In the job details, I see the last run status for jobs. In this case, I don’t have any failed jobs (last run). However, I downloaded this earlier in the day, when I did have a job that failed in its more recent execution. Here’s what I see in the details if I scroll across. Look at the top line, which is the failure.

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    I can see the reason the job failed and the date/time.

    If I were grabbing this every day, I’d have a nice report of how things are going. I would like to see a more detailed version of a report, and if you want it, please email sales@red-gate.com and request it.

    Summary

    Getting reports to share with others is important. As much as I’d just like to get people to look at the tool, I do understand having periodic reports. I used to self-generate these and store them off in a secure place. These were invaluable for auditors and kept them from asking me lots of questions.

    You could do this as well, and Redgate Monitor makes it easy to get this info. Look for enhancements in this area in the future that might help you with estate level reports for your management (or auditors).

    Redgate Monitor is a world class monitoring solution for your database estate. Download a trial today and see how it can help you manage your estate more efficiently.