Voice of the DBA

Tag: syndicated

  • Changing Case in SSMS–#SQLNewBlogger

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

    I never knew I could change case for objects in SSMS easily. This actually was something that another individual pointed out to me, but once I tried it, I liked it and know I’ll use it at times.

    CTRL+Shift+L will lowercase whatever text is selected in SSMS. A quick gif to show this below, where I select a portion of the code and then CTRL+Shift+U to upper case it, which is what I’d want. I then CTRL+Shift+L to put it back.

    Untitled Project

    Normally I use SQL Prompt to do these types of things, but that reformats the entire section of code. I don’t always want to do that. I could certainly CTRL+K, Y, which would upper case this according to my current format, but I can’t change to lower case easily. Knowing these shortcuts makes it easy for me to match case if needed.

    SQLNewBlogger

    When I ran across this and realized it was new, I just wrote this post. It took about 5 minutes and I spent more time deciding if I should record the screen than it took to just do it.

    You could easily write this type of post as you learn small things. Tag them with SQLNewBlogger as well to encourage others.

  • Daily Coping 13 Dec 2021

    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 do something helpful for a friend or family member.

    My daughter is coming home, after being away at university since early August. I’ve been caring for her plants, so watering every few days, but I did a few extra things to prepare for her visit.

    First, I cleaned the linens in her room, so when she gets home (late in a week), the bed is clean. I also bought some kitty litter, as she’s returning with her cat and there aren’t supplies in her room.

  • 2021 Advent of Code–#SQLNewBlogger

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

    I’ll do a post on how to easily get started here as a new blogger, but following the Advent of Code, even some random problems, is a good way to show off some T-SQL skills.

    This won’t be a goal for me, but I did start working on the 2021 Advent of Code, taking a few minutes across some days to break from other work and solve a programming problem.

    My aim this time is not to get stuck on a problem. If I can’t solve it, or don’t see a way, I leave it and move on. This post has a few thoughts on the first few days.

    Day 1

    The first problem dealt with loading a set of data and then counting how many times the number increases from the previous number.

    Since numbers in a SQL table don’t have a guaranteed order, this was a bit of a hack from me. I created a table and added a clustered index, and then bulk inserted the data. I then moved this in the same order (I hope) to a table with an identity column. From here, simple LEAD to find the differences between consecutive rows and counting these.

    The second part changed the calculation slightly to use groups of three rows. I copied my LEAD formula to include 3 rows instead of just 1 in each side of the calculation.

    Day 2

    We’re in a submarine, moving forward or up/down. The input was something I needed to evaluate in order again, so I repeated a similar load. Then I used SUBSTRING and CASE to decide what type of instruction was needed and sum the results.

    Part 2 was tricky. I bailed initially, as I couldn’t quite get the math down in my head. I eventually set up a small test data set using the values on the site and then used that to calculate things. I had a series of CTEs that I used to extract the values, then get changes, then perform the math.

    Letting part 2 sit for a day in my head helped me focus better.

    Day 3

    Day 3 was fairly easy binary counting. The test data doesn’t depend on order, so I just loaded it up. Then I need to extract the values into the bits, so SUBSTRING each of these out in a CTE. Not dynamic, but it was easy to extract all 12 bits, then count up the number of 1s and 0s, deciding which was more prevalent.

    From there, a simple calc to assemble back the counts into a binary number and convert to decimal.

    Part 2 is really about counting the 1s and 0s in each position, then creating a final binary number from this and converting back to decimal. I had to read carefully here, as you need to reduce your input set each time. I ended up looping here, as I couldn’t find an easy way to do this otherwise. I could have added some flag to ignore rows, but ended up with a temp table and deletes to get this done.

    So far, easy, harder, then easier.

  • Daily Coping 10 Dec 2021

    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 support a charity, cause, or campaign you care about.

    I tend to concern myself with charities that deal with kids, food, and education. I support Habitat, mostly because this helps families and kids get into stable situations.

    This month is one to think about others. I’m volunteering next week for Habitat, giving a day of time to help build a new house.

    I’ve also purchased a few extra items at the grocery for local food banks, giving them donations to help with their work.