Voice of the DBA

Tag: syndicated

Daily Coping 15 Apr 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 get natural light early in the day. Dim the lights in the evening.

Like many of you, I work indoors for most of my job. While I do have a window, I can get distracted on the computer and not look outside. I do try and take some breaks, and may go outside, but likely not enough.

A few days before this post, I went to get my first COVID vaccine. I was up early, outside in the car for a few hours as we drove and waited. I came back to work, but I made it a point to get up a couple times and take a 10 minute break outside. walking around a bit and enjoying the day.

Evening was good, as I tried to take it easy, so we lowered some lights, and my wife and I read a bit and chatted in bed.

April 15, 2021
The PowerShell Basics If Statement–#SQLNewBlogger
Another post for me that is simple and hopefully serves as an example for people trying to get blogging as #SQLNewBloggers.

This is a fairly simple construct, but I keep looking up the syntax if I haven’t written anything for a couple of weeks, which does happen. I’m hoping this quick post will help me remember the structure.

Parenthesis and Braces

The general structure is simple. It’s like this:
```
if ($a -eq 1) {
# do something   
}
```
This structure has the test expression inside the parenthesis and then any statements to execute, one or more, inside braces. Fairly simple, as long as you remember the –eq, –gt, –lt, etc.

If you have an ELSE, then you add that next with the braces again.
```
if ($a -eq 1) {
# do something   
}
else {
# do something else
}
```
That is easy to remember, as long as you use one language. I’ve been working more with Python, which is where I think I get confused.

SQLNewBlogger

This was about the 5th or 6th time I looked up the syntax, so I stopped and wrote this. It took only about 10 minutes to do this, no need to do more than mock up code, but show how this works.
April 14, 2021
Daily Coping 14 Apr 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 turn a regular activity into a playful game today.

One of the things I like to do to relax is play some guitar. While I enjoy learning and playing songs, I don’t do quite enough dedicated practice for things like scales. These would help me with improving my play and exercising my fingers. I’ve seen a few exercises, but I haven’t always been interested.

Today I tried something different. I set up a metronome app on my phone, and set it to a fairly slow speed. I then worked on a scale, matching the beat.

Not terribly playful.

However, I started to try other things.
- doubling up, two notes for each beat
- tripling up, 3 notes for each beat
- playing triplets, as in for the C scale, playing
- Skipping some beats. As a prelude to some solo practice, I would play3 notes on one beat, then let a beat go by, holding the 3rd note. Then 3 more on the 3rd beat, and holding the fourth.
None of these are earth-shattering, but they do make the exercise a little more fun, and they are a little game.

Now if I would do this more often.
April 14, 2021
T-SQL Tuesday #137–Notebook Uses

It’s actually my month to host T-SQL Tuesday, and I came up with the notebook idea last year. Aaron Nelson (b | t) sent me a link to a talk he did at a Meetup. It contained some interesting things, showing how you can use notebooks. Worth a watch.

For me, I don’t use notebooks a lot in my work. I had thought about using them to show clients and customers how to use our products, but I hadn’t moved far in that direction. I think too many customers are still using SSMS primarily, and haven’t moved to ADS.

The one place I’ve found them interesting is with Python. When I am sometimes trying to work through an issue, I think it’s easier to run a cell of code and get some results to work through an issue. If I use the REPL, I lose things. In VS Code, which I prefer, I don’t like the split code/terminal. I find that slightly annoying. Notebooks make things easier.

I was doing this recently, as I tried to work on the Advent of Code. I tried different parts of an algorithm in different cells, just to see what the results were. This helped me to work out some logic.

That’s not a great algorithm, and I got better over time, but this was really a good way for me to think about the sections of the problem, putting each on in a separate area.

It’s a little of “teaching myself” within the construct of a notebook. After all, that’s what a lot of data scientists are doing when they start to go through different code items in a notebook. They can share the notebook with others, which helps to teach.

For me, it’s teaching myself.

April 13, 2021