Voice of the DBA

Tag: T-SQL Tuesday

The Next Event: T-SQL Tuesday #145

It’s time for T-SQL Tuesday again, and this month the host is Xavier Morera. He’s been part of the push I had to get a host with every letter of the alphabet. Silly, but fun for me. Now I just need I, O, Q, U, Y, and Z.

The invite this month is about conferences, and specifically what is your favorite event, venue, presenter, and where you want for your next event. A topic near and dear to my heart as a speaker and organizer, so I’m looking forward to what people write.

Favorites

I’ve been blessed to go to many events. My Speaking CV shows most, but I’ve been to quite a few others as an attendee. My favorite conference is SQL Bits. They event is always slightly different, the themed party is fun, and they are family friendly. I see people from all over the world, and I’m excited just thinking about going in 2022.

My favorite venue is harder. Lots of venues are just spaces, just conference centers. That being said, I think that there are a couple that stand out. Bangalore had a beautiful conference center. SQL Saturday #66 in Colorado Springs was in a games/go-kart center. The elementary school at the Jewish Center in Portland. All memorable locations.

I think my favorite place I’ve been was the Royal Society of Medicine in London. Redgate rented this out for a few events, and it’s nice, lots of comfortable seats, plenty of bathrooms, tables for lunch. It was quite a nice venue.

My favorite speaker is tough. I’ve seen many, and I’ve enjoyed most. I’ll give a nod to Amir Netz, from Microsoft, who I’ve seen quite a few times over the years. He’s entertaining, funny, and smart. Half the time I don’t quite understand what he’s talking about, but I’m enjoying it just the same.

The Next Event

I’m blessed in that I’m actually just returning from my “next event”. I was in Las Vegas last week for the SQL Server and Azure SQL Conference at DevIntersection. I’ve been lucky that I was able to attend a few live events this year (2021) and am looking forward to more in 2022.

Costa Rica would be an amazing next event. I have never been there and would love to go. I’d speak, volunteer, and help organize if someone is interested.

It’s a tough time in the world, and I know that holding a live event might not be possible, or safe, in some locations. I would love to return to New Zealand, I’m looking forward to Jacksonville in the spring, as I’ve never been able to make that SQL Saturday.

If I had to choose, I’d want to get a SQL event in Tokyo and go there. I have never been to Japan, and it’s on my list of places to go at some point, so I hope I hear 日本へようこそ one day.

December 14, 2021
T-SQL Tuesday #144–Data Governance

This month’s topic is something I wouldn’t have considered a decade ago. Especially in the US, this isn’t something that I’d actually have cared about for most of my career. Even when companies talked about governance, it was more a checkbox exercise.

Dr. Victoria Holt brings us this invitation from the UK, and I think it’s a great one. This is a data topic that will impact more and more of us in the future. Not all of us, but certainly plenty of us.

If you haven’t thought about this topic, I’d urge you to write something, even if it’s a view that this isn’t necessary. Share your thoughts, this month or in the future.

Data Governance Effort

My employer, Redgate Software, has been interested in this for a number of years. We are a UK company, and when the GDPR passed, we knew this would be a concern for us and our customers.

We built a product to help customers classify and understand their exposure in databases. I hope this expands out to other sources, because I feel this is a constant challenge. While lots of data is in database, we are constantly pulling it out and sharing it in files, reports, and more.

Security is hard, and I don’t know that we’ll end up completely controlling the access and data, but I do think that we need to understand where our risk and exposure are as we share data.

This is a hard job, and a boring one. I can’t see many people enjoying the process of dealing with data governance. We need to make this easy to do, in a distributed fashion by many people as they notice something is not being managed. At the same time, I think that we need to be regularly reviewing and examining security against policies. We have far too many public access points being used to share information when things should be secured.

I don’t know how we reconcile those things, and decide on the value of doing them. Some products may work well, some I think are too targeted, and some too expensive.

I believe data governance matters, but not sure how we actually get to a place that it’s well done in many organizations. Especially in the US.

I hope I’m wrong.

November 9, 2021
T-SQL Tuesday #143 – Short Code
I’m late, but I wanted to get this out. I started the post, then got distracted with travel to Europe late last week.

In any case, this month the host for T-SQL Tuesday is John McCormack, with his invite to write about short code examples. It’s a good technical invite, and one that immediately got me thinking about things I do often.

If you haven’t ever tried a T-SQL Tuesday, set up a blog and put out a post on the topic, this week or whenever you read this.

Snippets

I work for Redgate Software, though I’d likely be using SQL Prompt no matter what. I was never thrilled with native intellisense, but SQL Prompt has been great. One of the things I like most about Prompt are the snippets, which let me insert code with a few keystrokes.

Here’s a quick example. If I type “” in SSMS, I see this:

Prompt detects this as a snippet first, then has other matches. I can hit Tab, and I’ll get this:

I get a quick “top 10” from a table. Often I use SELET * for a quick look at the shape of data.

However, I can add custom snippets, and one I use often is this:
```
WITH myTally(n)

AS

(SELECT n = ROW_NUMBER() OVER (ORDER BY (SELECT null))
  FROM (VALUES (1), (2), (3), (4), (5), (6), (7), (8), (9), (10)) a(n)
   CROSS JOIN (VALUES (1), (2), (3), (4), (5), (6), (7), (8), (9), (10)) b(n)

)

SELECT *

FROM myTally
```
This is my “tt” snippet, so I can type “tt<Tab> and get this code for a tally table. This s handy in many string manipulation and problem solving situations.

If I need more than 100 rows, I can easily copy the cross join line, add a new alias, and I have 1000 rows with this:
```
WITH myTally(n)

AS

(SELECT n = ROW_NUMBER() OVER (ORDER BY (SELECT null))
  FROM (VALUES (1), (2), (3), (4), (5), (6), (7), (8), (9), (10)) a(n)
   CROSS JOIN (VALUES (1), (2), (3), (4), (5), (6), (7), (8), (9), (10)) b(n)
   CROSS JOIN (VALUES (1), (2), (3), (4), (5), (6), (7), (8), (9), (10)) c(n)

)

SELECT *

FROM myTally
```
Short, but effective code.
October 13, 2021
T-SQL Tuesday #142–What is Bicep?

It’s time for the monthly blog party, and this month the host is Frank Geisler. I was reaching out to various people last year to find hosts, and also (silly-ly) looking for first names to fill out the alphabet on the host page.

Frank is a fellow MVP and a BI expert. He was gracious enough to agree to host and I thought he picked an interesting topic. This month’s invitation is about scripting to deploy resources. I don’t do a lot of deployments over and over, but I have been interested in one area. It’s actually been a tab in my browser open for a few weeks, so I took this opportunity to dig in.

Bicep

I’ve been seeing this term used in various blogs, and in the MVP email list we have. I wasn’t sure what it was, and I kept thinking of this:

That’s not it at all, and I was glad I went through this resource.

Bicep is a transpiler, meaning it takes one language and translates it into another. In this case, the Bicep language will move code into the ARM JSON templates. JSON is really for machines, not humans, so the idea is to give sysadmins and developers an easy way to describe resources they need to deploy into Azure.

The language is new, and it’s on Github. This is a DSL (domain specific language), which means it was designed for a specific purpose. With the 0.3 release, the language is built into the Azure CLI and Azure PoSh utilities, so this will do the transpilation for you. There’s also a decompiler to go from an ARM template back to Bicep. It’s also supported by Microsoft, which is always a plus if you need to call for some issue.

I don’t know a lot about Terraform, but this appears to be another language designed to do the same thing. The FAQ in GH notes this is a revision of ARM, which I guess makes sense. I’m guessing at some point they’ll try to get people to not use ARM (or stop supporting this) and only work with Bicep. Azure supports Terraform, so I’m guessing this is more an attempt to deprecate ARM and the challenges of customers working with JSON.

A couple things I did like about this. First, there are modules, so you can reuse some code. There is also intellisense, validating and getting you actual resources from Azure that are available. I do worry about deprecation that makes it difficult to deploy a copy of an existing resource when Azure is trying to push you to use some new resource. However, I do think the intellisense and validation in the VS Code extension improve productivity for developers and sysadmins.

Reuse also helps infrastructure teams assist developers by providing them modules that adhere to good or best practices.

The language looks like a mix of Python and YAML. Not too hard to understand, and with help, this should be easy to use to create a resource.

I’m pressed for time today, so I’m not going to experiment or set up an environment, but I need to add this to a list of things to do.

Why call it Bicep? No idea. I can’t find an answer, but I did someone say these are “ARMless deployments”. Not sure that fits with Bicep, but I like the logo.

September 14, 2021