Voice of the DBA

Category: Blog

Getting the Hyperlink from Excel
I had a spreadsheet of data that contained hyperlinks. In this case, it was a series of Microsoft Knowledge Base Articles with a hyperlink associated with them. I would assume there’s an easy function in Excel to extract these, but apparently there isn’t. That’s certainly a useful function for a data person.

I turned to the handy, dandy Google and found this Q&A and Superuser. I needed to delve back into VBA and build a macro, which is easy, but seems silly. In any case, I pasted this in and then set a formula based on a cell.

And got a 0 in the field. I started to try and debug this, before trying another cell. That one worked. Apparently some of my cells, formatted as blue, underlined text, don’t really have formulas.

No big deal, but good to know.

Here’s the macro formula repeated from the post, just in case.
```
Function GetURL(cell As range, Optional default_value As Variant)
 'Lists the Hyperlink Address for a Given Cell
 'If cell does not contain a hyperlink, return default_value
      If (cell.range("A1").Hyperlinks.Count <> 1) Then
          GetURL = default_value
      Else
          GetURL = cell.range("A1").Hyperlinks(1).Address
      End If
End Function
```
August 30, 2017
The Game Night Poll

This year we’ve handed off Game Night to the PASS organization and it’s an official event. Volunteers from the community will help setup, manage, and tear down the event. Kevin Hill is taking the lead, but if you’re willing to help run the night, let he or I know.

Kevin has a poll up, asking what games he should invest in for PASS. If there’s something you’d like to play, think others will enjoy, and don’t want to bring your copy, let him know.

Also, don’t forget to purchase a ticket if you are coming to the Summit and want to attend this party on Thursday night. There isn’t a party this night, so Game Night is a low-key, fun, competitive space to enjoy with fellow gaming attendees.

Purchase a Ticket

August 29, 2017
The Redgate Hub

It’s live, but we are having a livestream event to launch this officially to the world. On September 6, 2017, I’ll be in Cambridge at the Redgate office to host a live event.

Register today and join us for one of the two times to watch what’s new at Redgate.

The Redgate Hub is the place we’ll have most of the Product information and knowledge customers need, with the goal of making it easier for you to learn about and use our tools.

I’ll do some writing there, and answer questions when I can, but check out our Livestream and visit the Hub.

August 29, 2017
The World of MySQL

I had two different people ping me on the same day with MySQL questions. One was a former co-worker, asking for some query help, and one was from the Boy Scouts of America, also asking for some query help for a few reports. Strange that both requests came on the same day.

I didn’t have a MySQL install on the latest incarnation of my desktop or laptop. I did pop MySQL Workbench on a laptop last year, playing with Azure deployments, but no server. I deployed a MySQL instance on an Azure VM, but I had trouble connecting. Either the Ubuntu instance didn’t have the MySQL ports open (should have in the template), or I typed the password wrong. Either way, I just decided to delete that resource group (I love resource groups) and download the MariaDB server.

It’s a standard download from Mariadb.org and it’s not too large. In fact, it took longer to download than install. The install was a standard msi installer, and ran in a minute or two.

From there, I started up MySQL Workbench, which I’d downloaded and installed. I entered my user and password, using the default ports for the server.

And things worked, as they should in 2017.

From there, I selected the data import and chose the file I’d been sent. It was (supposedly) a MariaDB dump, but listed as a .sql file. Looking through it, it has SQL and data inserts, so I ran it with the Data Import.

This ran for less than a minute and things were complete.

And sure enough, some MySQL syntax (googled to remember) works.

Now to debug some queries for a friend.

August 28, 2017