t-sql-tuesday

T-SQL Tuesday #107 - Death March

Andy Levy
This month’s T-SQL Tuesday is hosted by Jeff Mlakar and he asks us to write about a project that went horribly wrong. My story isn’t really worthy of the name “death march” but it was a pretty rough project. The project started sometime in mid-2003. I was working as a web developer (Classic ASP) for an insurance company and they wanted to modernize the underwriting process with a web-based “workflow” application.

T-SQL Tuesday #104 - Code You Would Hate To Live Without

Andy Levy
This month’s T-SQL Tuesday is hosted by Bert Wagner and he asks us to write about code we’ve written that we would hate to live without. First off, “hate” is a pretty strong word so let’s go with “code you couldn’t bear to live without”. The first bit of code I couldn’t live without is reviled in some circles. More often it’s misunderstood and lamented, or…well, I’ll just show it to you.

T-SQL Tuesday #99 - Dealer's Choice / sqlibrium

Andy Levy
This month’s T-SQL Tuesday from Aaron Bertrand gives us a choice: Life beyond the technical in a search for what Drew with the Burdensome Name calls #sqlibrium Your own T-SQL bad habits And I’ve got one, maybe two posts in progress on the first topic. Alas, ironic that being swamped with work is blocking me from writing my #sqlibrium #TSQL2sday post — Andy Levy (@ALevyInROC) February 12, 2018 Thanks to Eugene Meidinger (blog|twitter) for nudging me in the direction of posting this.

T-SQL Tuesday #96: Folks Who Have Made a Difference

Andy Levy
It’s time for T-SQL Tuesday and this month’s edition is hosted by Ewald Cress (blog|twitter). It’s non-technical this month because we’re all recovering from PASS Summit. Ewald asks us to: give a shout-out to people (well-known or otherwise) who have made a meaningful contribution to your life in the world of data. This post is both difficult and easy. Difficult because there are so many people in the community whom I’ve learned from.

T-SQL Tuesday #94 - Automating Configuration Comparison

Andy Levy
This month’s T-SQL Tuesday is hosted by Rob Sewell and he’s posed the following question: What are you going to automate today with PowerShell? I’m cheating a little bit in that this is something I did a couple weeks ago, but it was immensely helpful. I’d been working on building out a new instance to migrate our test databases onto, but the developers had an urgent need to do some testing in isolation so they “borrowed” that new instance.

T-SQL Tuesday #92: Lessons Learned the Hard Way

Andy Levy
This month’s T-SQL Tuesday is hosted by Raul Gonzalez and he’s asked everyone to share things we might be a bit embarrassed about: For this month, I want you peers to write about those important lessons that you learned the hard way, for instance something you did and put your systems down or maybe something you didn’t do and took your systems down. It can be also a bad decision you or someone else took back in the day and you’re still paying for it…

T-SQL Tuesday #86: SQL Server Bugs & Enhancement Requests

Andy Levy
This month’s T-SQL Tuesday is hosted by Brent Ozar and he’s asked everyone to find interesting bug or enhancement requests in Microsoft Connect related to SQL Server. The Connect item doesn’t have to have anything to do with T-SQL – it could be about the engine, SSRS, R, the installer, whatever. Now, more than ever, Microsoft has started to respond to Connect requests and get ’em fixed not just in upcoming versions of SQL Server, but even in cumulative updates for existing versions.

T-SQL Tuesday #83: Why Leave Well Enough Alone?

Andy Levy
It’s 2016. So why are we still dealing with T-SQL code and design patterns that were designed 7 versions ago? In the 15 years I have been using databases professionally, we’re still dealing with: Peoples’ names are split into first name, last name and middle initial fields. Ignoring that this falls afoul of several of the myths programmers believe about names, the first name column was defined as CHAR(10) in a standard installation.

T-SQL Tuesday #61 - Giving Back

Andy Levy
Wayne Sheffield (blog|twitter) is hosting this month’s T-SQL Tuesday and his topic is Giving Back to the SQL Community. More specifically, he’s asking how each of us is planning on giving something back to the SQL Community in 2015. He offers up a few suggestions, so I’ll start by addressing those and then move on to additional ideas. Are you going to start speaking at your local user group? Yes, I expect that by the end of 2015 I will have spoken to our local chapter at least once.

T-SQL Tuesday #58 - Passwords

Andy Levy
This month’s T-SQL Tuesday topic is passwords. I’m neither a DBA nor server/system admin, so the only passwords I get to manage are my own. But there’s still lots to talk about. Passwords (or rather, weak passwords) have been in the news a lotover the past two weeks, so it’s timely. This is the password story I’d like to tell my kids, but they’re too young to understand yet. What’s Your Password?