Voice of the DBA

Tag: syndicated

  • A New Word: Ozurie

    Ozurie – feeling torn between the life you want and the life you have.

    I think many people feel ozurie often. I certainly had a lot of this in my younger years. I’d see the success, the partners, the adventures, the experiences others had and I felt torn. I wanted to change my life.

    Today I don’t feel this. Perhaps It’s growing older and more settled, perhaps it’s appreciating the blessings and fortune I have had. My life is really amazing. Even the things that don’t go well, like broken planes or weather damage at the ranch, or a lack of sleep because of commitments are minor issues. I think this is beyond the life I wanted and I have it.

    I hope you find that, too.

    From the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows

  • Altering the Default Schema for a User

    I had to test something for a customer, and as a part of this there as a need to have a different default schema for a user. I wrote about that, but since this isn’t something that I (or many people) do often, I wanted to make a second post about changing the schema.

    The Scenario

    A user in a database needed to access certain objects, which were going to be located in a separate schema. The previous post looked at the issue for a new user, but for this one, I wanted to show how to change a schema for an existing user.

    This post shows how to alter a user’s default schema.

    The Solution

    When you add a user, this is a simple parameter as part of the CREATE USER DDL. In this case, you use the DEFAULT_SCHEMA parameter. The ALTER is the same, which isn’t the case with all parts of the T-SQL language. Sometimes there are procedures instead of true DDL.

    In my case, we wanted to change the default schema for a user. In the first post, the APIUser had the default of the WebAPI schema. Let’s move them to the Sales schema with this code:

    ALTER USER APIUser WITH DEFAULT_SCHEMA=Sales

GO

    That’s it and now if objects aren’t schema qualified, the APIUser will query the Sales schema first, then the dbo schema. If this user wants to query the WebAPI schema, they must schema qualify things.

    SQL New Blogger

    This was a minor part of something else I was doing. I noted this in the previous post, but then realized the ALTER was a good second post. I could have added this to the first one, but I like separating and focusing posts. Better for SEO if you care, but better for your workload and producing most posts.

    Outside of the work I was doing, the sketch of these notes took about 2 minutes, and then the entire post was < 10 minutes.

    You can do this.

  • A New Word: Exulansis

    exulansis – n. the tendency to give up trying to talk about an experience because people are unable to relate to it – whether through envy or pity or mere foreignness – which allows it to drift away from the rest of your story, until it feels out of place, almost mythical, wandering restlessly in the fog, no longer even looking for a place to land.

    I try to avoid exulansis in my verbal stories, but I know it doesn’t always work. I actually ran into this recently while traveling to a volleyball tournament as a coach. I wasn’t talking with a player, but rather a parent, talking a bit about my fatigue and challenges. On the 22nd of June, as I chatted about life, I realized I’d only been home for 7 days that month.

    This parent was a lawyer, primarily working in Denver and rarely traveling for work. They took vacations, but those tend to be spread out, where as this trip was my 4th of June. I realized as I tried to talk about the experience of crossing time zones and the world back and forth that this person couldn’t relate and my point was being busy and needing to catch up on chores, as well as dragging a bit at the tournament. The travel experiences across time zones weren’t really something that they could relate to.

    Interestingly enough, another parent heard and asked me for some tips, as they were about to embark on 3 cities in 3 weeks for work. They didn’t have exulansis from my story.

    From the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows

  • Creating a Speaking Failures Support Group

    Earlier this week the emails went out to speakers who submitted to the PASS Data Community Summit 2023 conference. These were acceptances and rejections, letting people know the results of the volunteer review.

    I got this one:

    2023-07-13 10_39_20-PASS Data Community Summit 2023 – Call for Speakers Results - Message (HTML)

    I had only submitted one session after being buried last year, and I assumed (we know what assume means) that this one would get picked. It wasn’t, and that’s OK.

    A Speaking Failures Support Group

    I know I’m not alone. I’ve had many speaking submissions rejected. From big conferences and little ones. It is disappointing, but I’ve learned not to take it personally.

    I know this is a hard message to get, especially for less experienced speakers. So I decided to a) publicly disclose my rejection, and b) create a place to get support.

    Since I am the editor of SQL Server Central, that’s a natural place for me to do this. I set up a forum for a Speaking Support Group, which you can use to post questions, ask for feedback on your submissions or ideas, get spell/grammar/phrasing help from others, commiserate with fellow speakers, and give them support/encouragement to try again.

    Feel free to join me there, and comment on my first post, hopefully telling me to not take this too personally.