Voice of the DBA

Tag: syndicated

  • Daily Coping 19 Aug 2022

    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 no plans day – Be kind to yourself and others.

    Unlikely today. Yoga scheduled, and perhaps a high school volleyball game. I also have to get the database weekly editorial done, so this is on the list.

    However, I had this day last weekend. I spoke at SQL Saturday Los Angeles 2022 and since I was already traveling, I asked my wife to come with me. She enjoyed a day at Venice on Saturday while I was speaking.

    Sunday we had no plans. We woke up and had a late breakfast before driving downtown to the “Wake Me When I’m Free” exhibition of Tupac Shakur’s life and music. Loved it, especially this quote. I think this is how I view the world.

    20220814_122549

    We then drove up to Oxnard, enjoying the view along the coast. We had an early dinner and then came back for a bike ride from Venice to Santa Monica and back. A quick drink by the water before calling it a day.

    20220814_191534

    Nothing planned, just deciding at each moment what to do, and a great, relaxing time for us.

  • Daily Coping 18 Aug 2022

    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 share an encouraging news story to inspire others.

    The drought is receding a bit in Colorado. I personally am concerned because we have land and fire is always a danger. Plus more drought means less hay, which means more $$$ for the hay we buy. It’s already near an all time high, so hoping more rain eases the situation a bit for the third cutting.

    Also, COVID is declining. No matter how you view the pandemic, having less cases and hospitalizations means that we open more things and more people get back to their normal, 2019-era, lives.

  • Creating TAIL on Windows for Text Files

    UPDATE: Article changed based on the comment from Mr. Sewell.

    I wrote recently about making a HEAD utility to find the top few lines from a text file. I used Powershell and scripting to make this work from any Windows command line on my machine.

    Someone asked about TAIL, which is easy, so I did this as well and set up a tail utility.

    Get-Content in Powershell will do this, so I took my head.cmd and did a save as in VS Code.

    2022-08-15 15_02_49-Save As

    Then I changed the “first” in the code to “last”, as shown here.

    UPDATE: Based on a comment from Mr. Sewell, I updated the code.

    There is a tail parameter for Get-Content, so let’s use that.

    powershell "get-content %1 -tail 10 | select-object"

    This gets me the end of a file. As an example this is below. Here’s a text file I have with various values. As you can see below, the bottom values are zeros.

    2022-08-15 15_19_39-D__Downloads_Chart Export 08_15_2022 21_19.csv - Sublime Text (LICENSE UPGRADE R

    Here’s my tail utility working:

    2022-08-15 15_23_49-D__Downloads

    UPDATE: I left the original piece below in italics, but with the tail parameter, this takes a few seconds.

    If I run this on a larger, 1.5GB file, it takes a few seconds.

    tail parameter change and quick execution

    In case you’re wondering how this works on larger files, it can be slow. This took 3 minutes on my machine to get the last ten lines of a 1.5GB file.

    2022-08-15 15_28_58-D__Downloads_imdb

  • Daily Coping 17 Aug 2022

    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 check in with someone who may be lonely or feeling anxious.

    I check in with my Mom regularly, as she does live alone. However, she’s not usually anxious about things. On the other hand, I have had a friend that has struggled the last few years. Some health issues, some employment challenges, and then personal struggles. I’ve made it a point to periodically just reach out.

    I did this again this week, just to see how they were feeling and if they were coping with life. I don’t think they’re lonely or anxious anymore, but it’s good to check.