Voice of the DBA

Tag: syndicated

  • A New Word: Licotic

    licotic – adj. anxiously excited to introduce a friend to something you think is amazing – a classic album, a favorite restaurant, a TV show they’re lucky enough to watch for the first time – which prompts you to continually poll their face waiting for the inevitable rush of awe, only to cringe when you discover all the work’s flaws shining through for the very first time.

    I’ve felt this quite a few times, often with my kids. Usually it’s an older movie or show that I loved and I try to introduce to them. Only to realize that in my naiveite of youth, I loved it more than it deserved and ignored the shortcomings.

    I also think that the cinematography and storytelling in media has improved so much over the years that many shows I loved as a kid don’t resonate anymore because the skill of media has grown.

    From the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows

  • Typing Strange Characters–#SQLNewBlogger

    I’ve had to type a few non-English characters lately, and this blog talks about how to do this.

    Another post for me that is simple and hopefully serves as an example for people trying to get blogging as #SQLNewBloggers.

    The Need for Non-English Characters

    Recently I wrote a blog on using Chinese characters. While you can copy/paste from Google, perhaps you want to actually type something regularly. For example, I have been learning French, and I sometimes need to

    Another one I’ve used fairly often is the British pound symbol.

    Typing Unicode characters

    There are Unicode characters for these symbols. While some keyboards may include these, the US ones do not. I can switch keyboards, and I have a Japanese keyboard, but

    A few commons ones for me are:

    • é (French e with acute (forward) accent) – 0233
    • è (French e with the grave accent) – 0232
    • ô (French o with the circumflex) – 0244
    • ç (French c with the cedilla,hanging thing) – 0231
    • £ (British pound symbol) – 0163
    • はい (Japanese yes, hai) – a little harder

    To type these, I press the ALT key and hold it. Then I enter the number. So, holding ALT and entering 0163 gives me this: £

    The Japanese is a little harder. There I needed to enable the Microsoft IME keyboard that lets me type the phonetics for Japanese characters. There are other ways to do this, but that’s what I did.

    Learning to work with other languages and characters has been interesting to me, and it’s nice to be able to type São Paulo instead of Sao Paulo. Especially when I communicate with people whose names contain non English letters.

  • The Four Different Types of Flyway Files

    This is documented, somewhat, but I wanted to put this down for myself, as the I don’t love the docs and they are hard to sort through.

    Flyway is open source software owned and maintained by Redgate, my employer. There are also paid versions with additional features.

    The Main Files

    There are essentially 4 different types of files you can use for scripts in Flyway. These are:

    • versioned scripts
    • repeatable scripts
    • baseline scripts
    • undo scripts

    I’ll discuss each of these in light detail below. This isn’t intended to replace the documentation, but give a short explanation of each.

    For each type of file, there is a naming standard, which is the same for all. Essentially, there is are four parts. As an example, I’ll use V8.2__add_new_table.sql to explain this. The four parts are:

    • The prefix for the type of script, in this case, a V script.
    • The version. for my example this is 8.2.
    • The separator, always two underscores
    • The description, add_new_table, in my case.
    • The suffix, which is an extension

    Versioned Scripts

    These are the V scripts, which are named with a V to start. These are scripts which are run once on each target, and intended to be those that change the schema. The “V” is the default, but this can be configured. I wouldn’t change this.

    These are typically the CREATE or ALTER scripts that you run to change objects. You can have as much SQL code in here as you’d like. Think of these as a SQL Compare deploy script. One or my objects changes.

    The run once is nice because once you’ve deployed these, you don’t want to run them again. If you write idempotent scripts, you wouldn’t care but most people don’t do that well.

    Repeatable Migrations

    These are used less in the current Redgate paradigm, but these are repeatable scripts. They are designed to run every time you run “flyway migrate”. Again, the default is an “R” script, but this is configurable. Again, don’t change this.

    These scripts don’t have versions because they execute over and over. This could be used for creating or recreating programmable code objects, like view/procedures/functions/packages. They could also be used for places you need to ensure data is always there or has certain values.

    These scripts run after the migrate scripts, so be aware of that.

    Baseline Scripts

    By default, baseline scripts are “B” scripts. This can be changed. These scripts have a database version that you want to start with for some purpose. Like a new development effort or new deployment project.

    These are run for new environments only, and usually contain all the base objects you might need. If you start a Flyway project on a database that has objects, put all the code to recreate this state (CREATE objects and add data) in a baseline script.

    Undo Scripts

    The undo scripts are the “U” scripts. This can be changed, and these should have a version that matches a versioned script. We can run one of these scripts corresponding to those versions to “undo” changes. Since you can’t really undo anything in the database world, these should include code that reverses the action of the V script.

    Be careful with these, especially if you run these more than a few minutes after the V script. Flyway isn’t checking that you won’t lose data.

    I’d only use these after extensive testing in a pipeline and then only if my deployment broke immediately. These are good for putting in a previous version of a view/proc/function and quickly rolling back.

  • A New Word: Volander

    volander: n. the ethereal feeling of looking down at the world through an airplane window, able to catch a glimpse of far-flung places you’d never see in person, free to let your mind wander, trying to imagine what they must feel like down on the ground – the closest you’ll ever get to an objective point of view.

    I snap these types of photos all the time. This was me leaving Denver for Fort Lauderdale recently:

    2023-06-05 17_11_39-Photo - Google Photos

    Here was last year above Hawaii:

    2023-06-05 17_13_08-Photo - Google Photos

    and leaving Melbourne:

    2023-06-19 11_45_08-Photo - Google Photos

    As I fly, I sometimes think about the world below me, what it’s like from the ground, what it’s like for people who’ve walked there. Sometimes I plan to go someday and see.

    Often, I know I’ll never get there.

    I flew to Las Vegas a few weeks ago, and there are lots of places I could visit that I see, and some I have. However, much of the mountains above Colorado, the desert outside Las Vegas to the East, these are places I’ll never go.

    But I can dream.

    From the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows