Voice of the DBA

Tag: T-SQL Tuesday

  • T-SQL Tuesday #152–It Depends

    tsqltuesdayA great invitation this month from Deborah Melkin. I thought this was very apt, as I use this phrase often. Many of us do.

    This was a tougher post to write because, well, too many choices. However, I sat down to try and give an example of where this comes into play for me.

    Everyone should write a post, or a few posts, on this topic. Your decision making and reasoning are important things to share with others.

    The Devil is in the Details

    I deal with quite a few proof of concepts and questions about altering database development practices. One of the questions I’m often asked is how does a particular group get started with automating their database deployments.

    It depends.

    That’s really the answer, and I have to start to ask them questions about their pains. What is the driver for change? What things don’t work well right now? The answers to what doesn’t work well will drive how we move forward.

    Is it failed deployments? If so, then is this bad code? Let’s test more. If it’s people not always running all the scripts, or the right scripts, then we need a test environment where we actually run scripts to see if they work.

    Do you lose track of what changes developers have made? Let’s make sure we have version control as a funnel to capture all changes, and from there we can look at manual or automated deployments of what’s changed.

    Are you struggling to get code that meets the requirements? Again, testing can help, but maybe you need to structure better communications between developers and business customers, and make small changes that your customers can actually see and test.

    If you can’t keep up with requests from developers, then maybe this isn’t about database development and this is more of a staffing issue.

    The devil is in the details, and to make a successful leap to a smooth DevOps process for database development, we want to adapt to your environment. Let’s address the pain, and minimize the changes we need to make.

    There isn’t a once size fits all. This is a set of tools and principles we want to use, but in a way that works best for your situation.

  • T-SQL Tuesday #151 Coding Standards

    This month the T-SQL Tuesday blog party is hosted by my good friend, Mala. This is her fourth time hosting and she has a good topic this time. While I love her hosting, and a few others, I would like to see more people participate and take a month on their technology of choice.

    You can submit to host by contacting me on Twitter and reading the host page.

    Coding Standards

    I am a big fan of standards, both for coding and naming, when building software. I feel that having some standards help share information among staff. Since staff might come and go on a project, the less friction that we have, the better off we are.

    With that being said, the main standard for me is that the team has a standard. Preferably the organization has a standard, but we want to ensure that everyone follows a similar style of coding. This includes naming and style.

    For example, if we want plural names for all entities, let’s stick to that. I think singular makes more sense, and despite my habit of years of plural, I have been working to change. If my team wanted to go one way or the other, I’d just work with them.

    The same thing goes for commas. I like commas before a column list, but if the team prefers after, then that’s OK. I can adapt. Especially with a tool like SQL Prompt that let’s me easily reformat to another style.

    The other advantage of coding standards, apart from transferring information, is that we can use templates and snippets of code as a way to speed up coding. We can even write or use code generators to ensure that we build the code that everyone understands.

    A Few Specifics

    For me, these are things I’d set up if there were no standards. I’d be welcome to debate on them and be willing to change. These are for SQL. For other languages, there would be similar choices based on the language.

    1. commas before column list columns
    2. start column list on a new line
    3. FROM, WHERE, ORDER, GROUP, HAVING all indented 1 space or tab from left
    4. I prefer spaces, but only lightly.
    5. align all clauses in WHERE on separate lines
    6. entities use singular names
    7. primary keys are named <tablename>PK
    8. if surrogate keys, use <tablename>ID as the column header
    9. FK constraints use FK_<source>_<destination>_<column1>_<column2>
    10. ALL indexes named as CDX_<table>_<column> for clustered or NDX_<table>_<column> for non clustered. CCX or NCX for columnstore.
    11. FK column in the child table uses the same name as the PK column in the parent.

    There are more, but this is a quick list. The important thing is to have standards.

  • My First Technical Job: T-SQL Tuesday #150

    It’s that time of the month again for a T-SQL Tuesday blog party. This month is hosted by Kenneth Fisher, who has hosted a few times in the past. I like this topic, and it’s a good one for me to think back to my earlier career.

    I am very curious to see what others might write.

    It’s Who You Know

    Perhaps one of the things that I learned early and didn’t believe is that networking, connections, and who you know matter more than what you know. The what is certainly important and can help you succeed in day to day work, but for landing jobs, networking is king.

    I actually had my first technical job as a computer person in high school. I had gotten interested in computers and owned a Commodore Vic-20 and 512, and later an Apple II compatible. My Mom wasn’t sure about spending all the money, but she did and I spent hours digging into how things worked.

    My neighbor owned a construction business, laying water and sewer pipe. Later I worked in that side of the business, but the spring of my junior year he was struggling to implement a new estimation and inventory program on his first PC. His secretary was a nice lady, but in her 50s and in the early 80s, computers were completely foreign. He chatted to my Mom about things and she said I might be able to help.

    This was the first time I was thrown into a situation where I didn’t know a lot, but it wasn’t the last. In fact, these same skills were useful as a consultant:

    • reading manuals
    • grasping the relation between quickly written words after the fact and software
    • experimenting without causing breakage
    • making backups and learning to restore
    • explaining how software worked or needed configuration in layman’s terms
    • perseverance when you are struggling
    • projecting confidence when you don’t feel you have much

    These were the things I had to do over a few weeks as I learned how the software worked, installed it (a few times), set things up, and worked with the secretary and a few foreman to help configure things the way they wanted them. I also had to train them to use the software to enter data.

    Outside of school, this was my first technical job. I think I got paid $10 or $12 an hour at the time when most jobs were $3.35/hr at minimum wage. No big earnings, but I probably made enough to buy a few $50 video games or software games.

    The rest, as they say, is history.

    BTW, laying water pipe a couple summers later taught me a lot as well.

  • T-SQL Tuesday #149–Advice about T-SQL to a Younger Me

    It’s that time of the month again, when we have the T-SQL Tuesday blog party. This month we have a new host, Camilia Henrique with an invitation on advice you would give to your younger self, but in the area of T-SQL. That’s a good one, and it focuses on a technical skill that many data professionals need.

    Participating in T-SQL Tuesday is a good way to practice your writing, your skills, and show your thoughts on some aspect of your job. Even if you miss the party one month, feel free to write a post later and link it to the main post on the T-SQL Tuesday site.

    Practice, Practice, Practice

    I learned SQL first as someone working with dBase, FoxPro, and Clipper. I moved to SQL Server and T-SQL later, with a basic grounding on how to query for simple sets of data, but I quickly learned performance can matter a lot.

    As I’ve tried to keep up with the language, one of the things that has struck me is that T-SQL can be complex to structure because it’s relatively simple with few keywords. You can unintentionally create cross joins or row-by-row (RBAR) structures that perform poorly and waste resources on your system.

    I’ve found that practicing with programming exercises and solving problems to be the best way to improve my skills. I don’t do it enough these days, and when I answer questions on SQLServerCentral, invariably one of the experts there will post a solution that performs better and I learn something new.

    If I were talking to myself, I’d say to look more deeply into APPLY and the OVER() clause right now. Make sure you understand tally tables and their uses, and work through exercises like the Advent of Code, Exorcism, Project Euler, or something similar. Heck, just answer questions in a forum for yourself, with your own solution.

    Learn how to create queries that can efficiently gather together, filter, and aggregate your data in ways that are helpful for clients without taxing server hardware. In the era of cloud computing and pay for data moved or data processed somehow, this is an invaluable skill.