If someone is trying to convince you it’s not a pyramid scheme, it’s a pyramid scheme – from Excellent Advice for Living
For sure. As much as I am optimistic and think the world is amazing, I also know there are lots of bad people out there. There are especially lots of scams, or scam-ish things happening. I’ve certainly seen a lot of ads for low-quality products trying to compete by producing great ads and exaggerating the benefits.
Pyramid schemes may be less common, but the idea remains. If someone is trying to convince you their offering isn’t a scam, it likely is.
Be careful out there on the wild Internet.
I’ve been posting New Words on Fridays from a book I was reading, however, a friend thought they were a little depressing. They should be as they are obscure sorrows. I like them because they make me think.
To counter-balance those, I’m adding in thoughts on advice, mostly from Kevin Kelley’s book. You can read all these posts under the advice tag.
I was looking back at my year and decided to see if SQL Prompt could help me with some analysis. I was pleasantly surprised by how this went. This post looks at my experience using this to help me write a few queries.
This year was a big one for me and New York City. By my count, I went there five times. I wanted to see if that was right.
I started by loading up a bunch of travel data I keep into a database. I do this to keep an eye on where/when I’m going places, so that I have a few of how busy I’ll be. In this case, I loaded data into a table. Here’s a short sample of data.
I started by asking Prompt AI to write me a query. Here’s the prompt:
Simple enough. I could have written what it gave me, so I asked for more. Since I’m not tracking trips, but where I am on days, I needed something better. My prompt is what I might express to someone else, non-continuous trips.
I got a 4 back from more complex code, which is looking for entries with the city being NYC or a variant. It then adds a LAG(), which is what I was thinking before I decided to let Prompt do this. Notice above I was already asking for dates.
I got my dates, but still 4 trips. I know I flew to the NYC area more times. In looking at the dates, I realized that one of the trips, Mar 31-Apr 2, was only to Jersey City. So I had asked for that above.
You can see more more complex code, which adds in New Jersey. The results were interesting. This has 6 trips, because on one another trip, I went to New Jersey for a day. I had forgotten that one.
Checking Countries
I wanted to do some country analysis. I knew there was a bunch of country data from 2025 in there, so I wrote a simple query. That gets me some data, but it’s a bit of a mess. I really want to know when I visited countries.
I used PromptAI with a simple request.
I got some results back, which were good, but included the USA. I then asked to remove this and you see the result.
This was a good query, overall, so I clicked the “Optimize SQL” button. I got these items added as comments.
There isn’t a lot to do here, but I created the index. The “optimize” had also added a FORCESEEK, which I didn’t realize at first, so I removed it.
Eventually I added back the USA, partially as this improves performance, but also, with the results, I got a good look at travel patterns. In this case, I can see when I’m in the USA and when I’m not. I liked that I had asked for the trip duration, but the GenAI also added days traveling on the trips, which was fascinating.
The final query is here:
;WITH TravelCTE
AS (SELECT Country,
TravelDate,
DaySpentTraveling,
ROW_NUMBER() OVER (PARTITION BY Country ORDER BY TravelDate) AS RowNum
FROM dbo.Travel WITH (INDEX = IX_Travel_YearCountry) -- Use existing index to improve performance
WHERE TravelDate >= '20250101' -- Using efficient date literal format
)
SELECT t.Country,
t.TripStartDate,
t.TripEndDate,
t.TripDuration,
t.TotalDaysSpentTraveling
FROM
(
SELECT Country,
MIN(TravelDate) AS TripStartDate,
MAX(TravelDate) AS TripEndDate,
DATEDIFF(DAY, MIN(TravelDate), MAX(TravelDate)) + 1 AS TripDuration,
SUM(DaySpentTraveling) AS TotalDaysSpentTraveling,
DATEADD(DAY, -RowNum, TravelDate) AS GroupingKey
FROM TravelCTE
GROUP BY Country,
DATEADD(DAY, -RowNum, TravelDate)
) AS t
ORDER BY t.TripStartDate;
Summary
This was an interesting experiment in having an AI help me do some data analysis. I could have written these queries, but it would definitely have taken me as long as it took to ask the AI and write this post to do so. I’d be messing with data, double checking myself, and trying to decide what I wanted.
I also found it interesting to have the AI write the code and I could think more about the data being returned. I found a few data anomalies that I corrected along the way.
Prompt AI is proving useful, though when I was going back and forth a lot, I got this message.
I’ve often done some analysis of my year in different ways. Last year I had a series of posts (health, music, reading, speaking, travel). This year, I took last week off, and it’s been busy up until then, so I decided to get back to a wrapped post with a few more numbers and less writing around the important data.
Speaking
I do a lot of speaking, so here are the numbers.
28 events attended
36 presentations
5 keynotes
12 Simple Talks podcasts
11 Redgate events – most of my year
3 SQL Saturdays (only 3 )
This was a year that a lot of my time was spent with customers. I did some training and speaking for them, including at customer events, but not as much publicly. I can’t decide if I need to do more in 2026, but it’s something to consider.
I have already submitted to 3 SQL Saturdays in 2026.
Travels
A big year of travel. Only two rough stretches, but otherwise I didn’t feel too stressed or burned out.
74 flights (70 on United)
110 nights in hotels
5 nights on airplanes
5 trips to the NYC area
5 trips to the EU
Visited 5 different countries (plus the US)
A quick look at my year plotted as distances from home. Looks a bit like Seattle (I’ve been re-watching Frasier).
A good year with lots of vacation as well. I had a few breaks with my wife in these places, either for Volleyball or vacation.
New York
Greeley
New Orleans
Dallas
Cancun
Big Sur
Milan/Turin/Barolo
Health
I try desperately to keep myself healthy. A decent diet, not great, but I try for fresh foods and proteins/veggies more. I don’t track the diet well, but I do track activity with my watch. I also got a Peloton bike this year, which has helped. A quick graph of activities for the year:
It’s mid December as I write this, but I’ve done a good job of doing cycling early in the year and a bunch of yoga as well. I’ve been battling tendinitis in an elbow, so much less weight training than I’d like. A few numbers
Yoga – 66 sessions (once a week on average)
Cycling – 113, including 76 on the Peloton as of Dec 12
Swimming – 5 times, which sucks. Too much travel and not enough effort here
Weights – 42 sessions, mostly as I bailed in the middle of the year with the elbow. Trying to at least get back to legs regularly.
I fell fairly healthy. My weight is slightly up, as I’ve fluctuated a bit with travel. My avg for the year is 228lbs, with a low at 224 and a high of 235.
My heart rate averages 51 at resting and 122 at a high, mostly from exercise. Not bad. I had hoped for a sub 50 resting rate, which I see a lot of days, but not for the year. I think some stress from travel and long days likely keeps it from falling more.
Music
I love music and look forward to my Spotify Wrapped every year. A few stats
37,820 minutes listened
364 genres
Pop Rap, Classic Rock, Alternative Country, and R&B where my tops
I didn’t get as much guitar or play as much as I’d have liked, but I did learn some new songs. Not great, but I did enjoy working through fingerpicking versions of The Sounds of Silence, Something (Beatles) and While My Guitar Gently Weeps. Those and a few Zach Bryan songs. I think I know as many from him as The Beatles.
One interesting thing was my music age was 78. Apparently I like listening to older songs more than newer ones.
Reading
I spend a lot of time reading, especially on airplanes. I don’t consume a lot of visual media. Reading is a great escape for me. I tend to read a few non-fiction/career/business books each year, but those are work, so it’s usually just a few. I might add in some biographies, but mostly I love fiction.
This year, as of Dec 19, I have read 148 books, which is a rise from previous years:
2025 – 148
2024 – 136
2023 – 111
2022 – 105
2021 – 118
2020 – 82
2019 – 128
A few stats from this year:
Most read authors, which were mainly from series that I devoured on airplanes.:
Mathew Rief (29)
J N Chaney (26)
Gerald Kilby (14)
Jason Kasper (12)
Janet Evanovich (9)
Lee Goldberg (6)
I had a number of re-reads as well from Jeffrey Deaver, John Sandford, Lee Child, and a few others that helped pass the time.
This was Redgate in 2010, spread across the globe. First the EU/US
Here’s Asia
I miss Brad. I enjoyed traveling around and working with him. I’d forgotten about Bob until I looked at this.
At this point, we had 200-ish people in Cambridge, UK and no US office. Just Brad, Bob, and me there.
We also had the major events. Pass Summit and SQL Bits still exist. The PDC, TechEd, and PASS Europe are gone.
Amazing to think how the world changed, both for Redgate as a company and as individuals. We’ve grown so much since then.
I have a copy of the Book of Redgate from 2010. This was a book we produced internally about the company after 10 years in existence. At that time, I’d been there for about 3 years, and it was interesting to learn a some things about the company. This series of posts looks back at the Book of Redgate 15 years later.
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