Voice of the DBA

Tag: syndicated

  • Daily Coping 8 Oct 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 avoid saying “I should” and make time to do nothing.

    Today is quarantine day for me. I’m in Belgium, actually, who knows. I flew to London overnight, then a trip to Brussels. I have to test and quarantine until I get results, so this is really a day of travel and doing nothing.

    My wife and I will likely just relax in the airport between flights and then relax in a hotel in Brussels, avoiding trying to do work or get things accomplished. I’ll likely even avoid any exercise with the quarantine and long travels. If I have results and feel better in the evening, maybe I’ll walk or lightly exercise, but overall, I want to have a day of rest.

  • Crossing Borders

    I’m about to cross a country border for the first time in almost two years. I last left the United States in December 2019. Today I’m flying to Belgium for Data Minds Connect and then to the UK for some work in the office.

    I’ll be in and out of touch for the next week as I adjust to travel, moving around, and a strange schedule. After being either in my home office or the Redgate Pasadena office for the last 22 months, I’m finally working and traveling to a different environment.

    Next week the blog will be quiet, other than coping tips, as I navigate a familiar, but somewhat forgotten world.

    Hopefully I have packed everything in my laptop bag, but if not, I’m sure I can purchase what I need.

    Glad to be back to traveling, even with restrictions and hassles.

  • Daily Coping 7 Oct 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 accept yourself and remember you are worthy of love.

    This is one of those tough things for me. I’m definitely a giver, and with history as someone that grew up in a broken home, I’m usually more concerned with others than myself. I also sometimes question if I deserve something.

    Over time, I’ve learned that no matter how I feel, I am worthy of being loved and cared for. I still struggle, but I constantly remind me of this.

  • Using NULLIF–#SQLNewBlogger

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

    I ran across the NULLIF() function recently, and I realized I’d never used it in code. It’s an interesting function, one that I didn’t think would be useful, but I found a couple places.

    NULLIF Behavior

    This function is essentially short for “return a null if these two values are equal.” There are two parameters you pass in and if they are equal, you get a NULL back. Somewhat strange function, but here are a few examples:

    2021-09-20 15_42_19-SQLQuery2.sql - ARISTOTLE_SQL2017.sandbox (ARISTOTLE_Steve (62))_ - Microsoft SQ

    The interesting one is that 1 and NULL come back with the first value. We can’t determine if NULL is equal to 1, so we assume not.

    Using This Function

    When would you use this? As I said, I have never thought to use this, but I did find a couple interesting items. A mixture of NULL and a certain value is one place, if you can use the NULL. For example, let’s say I have some data in a table:

    2021-09-20 15_44_46-SQLQuery2.sql - ARISTOTLE_SQL2017.sandbox (ARISTOTLE_Steve (62))_ - Microsoft SQ

    I have some blanks and some NULL values. Suppose I want to query and show the category, but if that is a NULL or blank string, show the SubCat instead. I can do this with a CASE, but that get’s ugly. NULLIF makes this easy to read.

    2021-09-20 15_45_56-SQLQuery2.sql - ARISTOTLE_SQL2017.sandbox (ARISTOTLE_Steve (62))_ - Microsoft SQ

    The other interesting place I thought of here was with aggregates and potentially filtering out some values. Aggregates tend to ignore NULL, so what if I have this data:

    2021-09-20 15_48_24-SQLQuery2.sql - ARISTOTLE_SQL2017.sandbox (ARISTOTLE_Steve (62))_ - Microsoft SQ

    Suppose I want the average sale, but not with the zero values. Those might be returns, and we don’t want to skew our average. I could use NULLIF to make this easy to code. Notice the short code below and the difference from the straight average:

    2021-09-20 15_49_03-SQLQuery2.sql - ARISTOTLE_SQL2017.sandbox (ARISTOTLE_Steve (62))_ - Microsoft SQ

    I could use CASE, but which is easier to read?

    2021-09-20 15_50_20-SQLQuery2.sql - ARISTOTLE_SQL2017.sandbox (ARISTOTLE_Steve (62))_ - Microsoft SQ

    I think NULLIF is, if you know how the function works.

    SQLNewBlogger

    This was a function I stumbled on and wasn’t sure how to read. I spent about 10-15 minutes searching around the Internet looking for a reason to use this code. I saved the link for them and added it into the post. I spent about 10 minutes creating a little code example and then running it.

    I then wrote this post, which was about 10 minutes, mostly because I used screen shots for code, which were quick to grab and paste in.

    This is a nice example of learning something, understanding how it works, and then thinking where it could be useful.