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It seems that the SQL community is really growing. There are now quite a few events that you can attend in 2010 to help further your SQL education.  It’s worth the investment to travel a little if any of these are close to you.

And if you’re a speaker, or want to give it a try, consider submitting an abstract to one of these events. Many of them would love to give you a chance to help others.

Here is the current list in date order. I’ve included a couple other events in addition to all the SQL Saturdays.

Jan 23, 2010
SQLSaturday #32 – Tampa 2010

Jan 30, 2010
SQLSaturday #34 – Boston 2010

Jan 30, 2010
SQLSaturday #30 – Richmond 2010

Feb 27, 2010
Rocky Mountain Tech Trifecta
http://rmtechtrifecta.pbworks.com/

Mar 6, 2010
SQLSaturday #33 – Charlotte 2010

Mar 13, 2010
SQLSaturday #37 – Philadelphia 2010

Mar 27, 2010
SQLSaturday #29 – Birmingham 2010

Apr 17, 2010
SQLSaturday #31 – Chicago 2010

May 1, 2010
SQLSaturday #36 – Wheeling 2010

May 22, 2010
SQLSaturday #27 – Portland 2010

May 22, 2010
SQLSaturday #35 – Dallas 2010

May 22, 2010
Indy TechFest 2010

That’s 12 events in the first half of the year, in addition to all the paid conferences that are going on! Very impressive and kudos to the community for getting these events set up.

Be sure you thank your local organizers and speakers if you attend.

I was checking on the status of my laptop the other day. It died and I shipped it back to Toshiba for repair. I ended up getting this in the status window:

What’s great about this is the last column. I have these dates:

12/02/2009 01:30:00

12/03/2009 21:52:00

12/03/2009 21:52:00

12/04/2009 13:39:00

12/07/2009 20:46:00

12/04/2009 13:41:00

12/04/2009 21:04:00

12/07/2009 18:52:00

12/04/2009 13:38:00

Amazing isn’t it? The most recent repair entries are the5th and 8th entries (of 9). If I was checking for a change and glanced at the bottom record, I’d think nothing had changed.

And in fact, nothing has changed in a week, but that’s another blog.

I’m sure a developer that doesn’t do a lot of database work built this screen, inserting test records, having them appear on screen and thinking things were working. And in limited tests, with small groups of data, the natural order often appears to be holding itself as valid. The natural order is the order that the records are inserted into SQL Server, and often with no indexing, or with a clustered index on a column, in this case the “done” column, they would return in that order.

However most database products don’t guarantee the natural order when you query for records. A fundamental aspect of my SQL systems is that there is no guarantee of order without an ORDER BY clause. Indexes are for performance, and can change. I wouldn’t be surprised if the clustered index for this table were put on the serial number and repair number instead of the date. That’s often how you’d query this data and would make sense. So without an ORDER BY date on this query, which clearly doesn’t exist, you get repair records out of order.

And you annoy customers.

Each year I attend an annual Christmas party that’s essentially a JD Edwards Operations department party. JD Edwards hasn’t existed for 8 years. Almost everyone has left the company, or what it has become, which is Oracle. Yet we still hold a Christmas party every December that brings together 20-30 families.

I’ve never seen a bond like that from a job. And it’s still there.

We used to have monthly teambuilding in our group, and occasionally bringing long a few people from related departments (engineering, help desk, etc.). We would have almost weekly lunches among the team, and even when Peoplesoft purchased the company and people started to leave, we still had monthly lunches. We still played fantasy football each year, and kept in touch. We also had a yearly Christmas party that included our former director.

It’s an amazing bond, and it shows that the power of a strong corporate culture continues even as the company is gone. The 30 of us communicate, recommend jobs to each other, or have even helped each other find employees we trust. There are small clumps of us, 3-4, that work together in other companies, even having moved companies together, and it’s become a trusted and valued network unlike any I’ve ever had.

I’ve kept in touch with people from other jobs, running into them or having lunch at times, but I’ve never seen 20-30 people leave a company, and still remain strongly bonded together.

The culture at JD Edwards, a 5,000 person company was amazing. It was like a big family and people really built strong relationships there. I was honored to have worked there, and it’s the kind of company that I wish was the rule rather than the exception.

It’s done, though I’m nervous about my laptop repair. The last entry on the machine prior to shipping is “repl hdd""

It’s not the end of the world, but I had already replaced the HDD with a larger one, I could read the one in there and backed up most everything I could think of. Still, my concern is not that I’ve lost data, but that I’ve lost space.

I was going to rebuild to Win 7, so this is a good time to make it happen.