Daily Coping 20 Apr 2022

Posted on April 20, 2022 by way0utwest

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 get active singing today (even if you can’t sing).

I can’t sing. My wife says I’m not too bad if I’m not trying to hit the notes, but I don’t think that’s an endorsement.

Fortunately, I am often in the car alone running errands. I have a few playlists, but here are the ones I’ll sing out loud today:

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Daily Coping 19 Apr 2022

Posted on April 19, 2022 by way0utwest

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 relax your body and mind with yoga, tai chi, or meditation.

I love yoga, and I tell the kids I coach that I wish I’d gotten into it at 20 years old. I haven’t done tai chi, though I would like to try. I struggle with meditation, but I have friends that love it.

I try to practice yoga 3-4 times a week, most of the time in a group class. I see beginners in there all the time, and I applaud them. I can’t recommend it enough. If you don’t want to invest in a class somewhere or you feel embarrassed, try a Yoga with Tim or Yoga with Adrienne class in the privacy of your home.

For me, I’m heading to the gym for a yoga class.

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Visualizing SQL

Posted on April 18, 2022 by way0utwest

While I think SQL is interesting, I know some people struggle with the way the language work. Someone at work posted a link to this site: https://animatesql.com/

I think the idea is this site helps you visualize how a SQL query works. It’s not free form, and I can’t just write any SQL, but you choose a keyword and then a sample query is shown. If you press Visualize, it walks through how this query is processed.

Below, I choose the WHERE keyword and then pressed visualize. The sample query had a NOT before the parenthesis, which I removed.

2022-03-30 09_13_50-Animate SQL

The animation then works through each row, showing whether it fits the criteria. Here I have captured what things look like in the middle:

sqlviz

Eventually this goes through the process again with the SELECT part of the query and pulls results from the yellow rows, according to the columns listed in the query.

If you try the different keywords, you see different visuals and queries. You can modify them slightly, and the comments in the query window let you know what you change. The modifications are small, but they do let you see how well things work in different ways, such as if you change the value or remove a logical operator, as I did.

As I tried a few different items, it made sense to me, but I wonder if it would for someone that was learning. I think that this ought to have some explanation of what is happening (i.e. comparing the name and rating in each row to be null or not, and matching the criteria). For the GROUP BY, I really think someone might not understand what they are seeing without some explanation.

I also think the lack of NULL in the data, and showing a blank, is highly misleading as well.

This looks like something a developer built, and I think it is creative and helpful, but like many 1.0 things, this needs some evolution and improvement.

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A Third Space

Posted on April 18, 2022 by way0utwest

It’s 2022, two years into a pandemic, and it finally seems that many things are returning to the way they were in 2019. Life outside of work is fairly normal for me, and I have a number of trips. Work is starting to pick up and we’ve seen a few conferences and SQL Saturday events pop up on the schedule.

Work is still mostly remote for many technology workers. Not all, and some companies are starting to require workers to come back to the office, part or full time. My son got a job as a software engineer and he has to go to the office every day for six months. After that, if he proves himself reliable, he can work at home 2-3 days a week.

For many tech people I talk with, there is a still a mostly remote atmosphere. The feelings about this situation vary dramatically from person to person, and from role to role. I find as many managers love remote work as hate it. I find more tech people prefer remote work, but not all, and certainly not all like working at home. Depending on your environment, and how many others might be at home (and their ages), you might find remote work more stressful than commuting to an office.

A friend pointed me to an article on someone that doesn’t love working at home and needs a third space. My friend feels the same way, as isolation and quiet can be hard to cope with for long periods. As much as I have loved working from home for nearly 20 years, I haven’t done this for 20 years. I’ve traveled regularly and when I have long stretches at home, I usually spend some periods in a Starbucks or another space just to be around people. Talking to my dogs isn’t bad, but they often don’t talk back in a way that satisfies my need for background noise.

My friend’s company has a subscription to WeWork, which allows remote employees to get some social interaction, or just ambient noise, as needed. We’ve experimented with this at Redgate as well, and while I don’t know I’d go to WeWork over a coffee shop or restaurant, I do appreciate the ability to have a space where 5 or 10 of us could gather in an ad hoc manner periodically. If I had more employees in Denver, I would look forward to meeting them a few times a month.

For those of you working at home, do you want a place to gather on a regular or periodic basis? Do you miss interacting with live people? Or do you love being alone at home. I certainly like the latter many days of the week, but I miss interacting with people on a regular basis. I look forward to regular trips to Redgate offices and more events where I can talk technology with people whose hands I can shake.

Steve Jones

Listen to the podcast at Libsyn, Stitcher, Spotify, or iTunes.

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