Voice of the DBA

Tag: syndicated

  • Office Upgrade – A Secret Lab Chair

    Last year I wandered over to Glenn Berry’s house for some lunch and a chat. While I got to see his home brewing setup and the latest in computer hardware, one of the neat things that stood out was a Secret Lab chair. It’s a nice looking chair, but when I sat in it, it put my $79 Office Depot chair to shame.

    I thought about it for a few months, but since I travel a lot, I wasn’t overly concerned. Then the pandemic and lockdown hit, and I was at my desk every day, and likely for the foreseeable future. I decided my back could use a little more support and an upgrade.

    I looked through the list and decided on a Titan chair. I’m 6’, 225lbs, and this seemed to be the chair to get. I ended up with a PU Leather version, fairly plain, without any special designs. There are some neat ones, but I’m a simple guy. Plus, no one sees this and the $50 for some special edition would make my wife just laugh at me every day.

    Here’s the chair in my office.

    20200717_125910

    Since I got this a few months ago, it’s more comfortable to sit in and it supports my back well. I like that I can easily adjust the back tilt, as I like to sit up straight most of the time, but I can lower it for calls or more relaxed situations where I’m not typing.

    I even upgraded it with some rollerblade-like Oasis wheels recently after we refinished our floors. These are fantastic and the chair now glides across the floor and carpet without any snags.

    20200717_125916

    This is a nice home office upgrade. It’s not cheap, but it is something to think about if you plan on spending a lot of time at your desk. Your boss might even cover the cost as an investment in you. It never hurts to ask.

    I got my chair for $379 early this year, and you can, too. They’re $399 now, but you can use this link to get $20 off and start enjoying a better experience at your desk.

  • Daily Coping 31 Jul 2020

    I’ve 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.

    Today’s tip is to think about what you can learn from a recent challenge.

    This wasn’t much of a challenge for me, but I learned something.

    Colorado implemented a mask order on Jul 16. That morning I’d coached a practice a volleyball team and we had a lot of fun. When the mask order was put in place, I wondered what might happen. A few days later I learned how things would go when I went to an open gym to help coach.

    After 6 girls the week before, we had 15 or 16 show up, all with masks. A big sign at the entrance noted that all coaches and players had to wear them. We took temperatures of everyone, as we have been, and then we went to work.

    Wearing masks.

    We ran drills, we played, and I only got a minor working hitting a few balls for them. Girls, however, ran around as they normally do, diving for balls and competing hard. A few would pull them down for a minute to catch their breath, but they wore them most of the time. I was impressed.

    I learned that the mask thing, while annoying, isn’t that bad. Even for athletes working hard. The next Thursday I held my tryout prep again, this time I participated with the 9 girls while the other coach inbounded balls. I ran, and worked, sweating, wearing the mask the entire time.

    It was hard, but I learned I can do it, too.

  • Daily Coping 30 Jul 2020

    I’ve 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.

    Today’s tip is to catch yourself overreacting and take a breath.

    I didn’t remember to breathe recently, but fortunately my wife helped me.

    Our sink got clogged up recently. I cooked some breakfast, and afterwards, I threw out a few pieces of old chicken that were in the fridge as I started me cleanup. The sink clogged, and I couldn’t get it to work. I took a break, then ran to the store for a snake, which I tried to use. I ended up taking apart the lower U joint and getting all 20ft down into the pipe, but I still looking at this:

    20200715_173004_HDR (1)

    I worked on this for a few hours, doing a little work when I needed a break, but at 5pm, I couldn’t figure anything out. I was frustrated, upset, stressed as I had some deadlines at work, I didn’t get to exercise, and I still didn’t have a working sink for dinner.

    My wife reminded me to breathe, to relax, and forget about it. She called a plumber for the next day, told the kids to find leftovers, and took me out for dinner and a drink to relax. It was good to just stop worrying about a minor thing and just move on with life.

  • Adding a FK to a Table–#SQLNewblogger

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

    One thing that helps ensure your data is intact and doesn’t get out of synch in a relational database is a foreign key. You ought to have these as a part of your design, ensuring that a linkage between a parent and child cannot be broken.

    This post looks at adding a FK to an existing table. I’ve written about how to do this in the CREATE TABLE statement in another post.

    I have two tables set up: Contacts and Status. Both of these have a StatusID column in them. The Status table contains the lookup values, and these are stored in the child table, Contacts.

    To add the foreign key, I add a constraint with the ALTER TABLE ADD CONSTRAINT syntax. After this, I use FOREIGN KEY to list the column(s) and then the REFERENCES phrase to point out the parent table and column.

    The example is shown here:

    ALTER TABLE dbo.Contacts
       ADD CONSTRAINT FK_Contacts_Status_StatusID FOREIGN KEY (StatusID)
          REFERENCES dbo.Status (Statusid)
    ;

    This will give me  a FK that enforces the values in Contacts as existing in Status.

    SQLNewBlogger

    I had to do this recently and decided to quickly write this up as I had to look up the syntax to be sure I remembered it correctly. Then it took me about 5 minutes to produce this.

    It took me almost as long to see if I’d already written about altering a table with a FK.

    Do this for your career, and to show interviewers that you know how to handle common data referential integrity tasks.