Voice of the DBA

Category: Editorial

  • How are you recharging this year?

    This is the end of the first half of the year. I’m hoping it’s been a good half year for you, as it has for me. I’ve traveled less, done a few more things outside of work, but had a good time at work as well. I’ve had to work on some projects and content that are engaging and fun. I’m looking forward to the next half of the year.

    No matter how much we enjoy our career, we all need to get away from work at some point. It’s important. We would love the perfect work-life balance, though I don’t know what that means or if it’s possible. You can make your job a little better taking some time to get away from work and getting refreshed and recharged. Today, I wanted to ask about your plans this year.

    How are you recharging?

    I just got back from a vacation with my wife. I had to travel for work and she came with me, putting up with a couple days of my work commitments before we took a few days to tour and enjoy the west coast of Ireland together. We are trying to do that more as my kids get older and more independent. We’ve taken a few trips over the last couple years and have another one planned later, when she’ll travel with me to Norway.

    It’s not just work trips. We also have a long family vacation planned in July, with two weeks of camping as we drive up to Glacier National Park and try to keep everyone mostly unwired. We’ll see how it goes, and certainly my middle son will need some connectivity as he’s in the middle of Linear Algebra and C++ programming classes, but hopefully the time will be minimal. Maybe I’ll get to watch him code some C++ and remember how glad I am that I don’t have to do that anymore.

    Let me know today if you have any plans for this year (or if you’ve already competed them). It’s always neat to hear the ways in which people look to spend their spare time. If you haven’t made any plans, I’d suggest you stop for a few minutes and think about how you might recharge away from work and try to get some plans in place.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcast

    Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 4.3MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and Libsyn.

  • String or binary data would be truncated

    Microsoft, please fix this. This issue is still out there, and once again, it’s the top voted on item for SQL Server. Everytime I see this:

    Msg 8152, Level 16, State 13, Line 1
    String or binary data would be truncated.

    I’m annoyed, and I’m not alone. If you’ve had to load data into SQL Server, and you’ve every encountered this error, you’ve probably been frustrated. In fact, when you get this particular error, you might wonder what to do.

    Many of us find this error to be a problem because we don’t know where the error is located. In fact, we often end up jumping through hoops to somehow track down the offending row. We might scan through our input file. Or we might build a parallel process to load the data into a series of MAX columns and then use T-SQL to search out the data, change it, and then export it again for us in our ETL process. Or we might throw up our hands in frustration and go for a walk.

    SQL Server developers, if you feel any of these things, go vote for this item.

    When there is a mismatch between our input data and the schema, there is a lot of friction to getting work done. While DBAs might be willing to track down the invalid rows, developers hate it and business people often get confused. This one reason why developers dislike relational schemas and look for easier data stores, like NoSQL databases. Trying to figure out that there’s one name in a list of 1000 that’s got 31 characters and doesn’t fit in a 30 character field is a pain for anyone..

    I have no idea of the effort to fix this, but this isn’t a syntactical sugar item. Microsoft, this is a piece of work that can be extremely helpful. Pick a method to solve thisand get to work. Ignore the error rows and output them, let us redirect them to another table, or some up with some other solution. Make something simple that works, but please, just fix this.

    It should be embarassing to you that this is still a issue that is reported and voted on in SQL Server.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcast

    Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 2.8MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and Libsyn.

  • Republish: When Work Gets in the Way of Work

    Coming back from Ireland today and the last day of vacation. A republish if When Work Gets in the Way of Work.

  • Republish: Closer to the Heart

    One of my favorite Rush songs, but also an editorial. I’m in Ireland with my wife, so it’s being re-run.