The Rochester, NY chapter of PASS is holding our 6th annual SQL Saturday on April 29th, 2017! As always, RIT is hosting our event on campus. SQL Saturday is a free day of training centered on the Microsoft Data Platform. Volunteer speakers come from all over the country (and sometimes beyond) to share their knowledge with attendees. There are sessions available for professionals of all skill levels, whether you’re just starting to learn about databases or a seasoned veteran, in addition to valuable professional development guidance.

This post is in support of Tim Ford’s (blog|twitter) #iwanttohelp challenge. And also written because this has burned me twice in the past 3 months and by blogging about it, hopefully it’ll stick in my mind. Setup I’ve recently been doing a bunch of work with stored procedures, trying to improve performance that’s been suffering due to suboptimal queries. Some of this tuning has resulted in creating temporary tables. After making my changes and running the procedures in SSMS, everything looked good - data’s correct, performance metrics are all improved.

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.

Something in SQL Server that isn’t always obvious to beginners is that when you create a default value for a column on a table, SQL Server creates a constraint (much like a primary or foreign key). All constraints must have a name, and if one isn’t specified SQL Server will generate one for you. For example: 1 2 3 4 5 CREATE TABLE [dbo].[point_types] ( [typeid] [int] NOT NULL DEFAULT(NEXT VALUE FOR [pointtypeid]) ,[typename] [nvarchar](30) NOT NULL DEFAULT 'Unspecified' ,CONSTRAINT [PK_PointType] PRIMARY KEY CLUSTERED ([typeid] ASC) ) We’ve got a simple table here and both fields have a default value set (the primary key’s value is generated from a sequence object, pointtypeid).

This week’s #sqlnewblogger posts! Author Post @eleightondick [[T-SQL Tuesday] Data modeling: The trouble with prefixes @tomsql Adventures With TomSQL, aka Tom Staab @EdDebug [Automatically name primary key constraints in SSDT @rabryst Born SQL on Twitter: “Temporal Tables - Under the Covers with the Transaction Log. @YatesSQL [Community Involvement–Why Wait? @cjsommer [Identity Column Increment Value (EVEN/ODD) @DBA_ANDY Nebraska SQL from @DBA_ANDY: CHECKDB - The database could not be exclusively locked to perform the operation @ALevyInROC Selectively Locking Down Data – Gracefully – The Rest is Just Code @eleightondick [SQLNewBlogger, Week 3 @tomsql Being Our Collective Best @SQLMickey [T-SQL Tuesday #72 Summary – Data Modeling Gone Wrong

I have a situation where I need to retrieve the data in an encrypted column from, but don’t want to give all my users access to the symmetric key used to encrypt that column. The data is of the sort where it’s important for the application to produce the required output, but if a user runs the stored procedure to see what the application is getting from it, it’s not critical that they see this one field.

This week’s #sqlnewblogger posts! Author Post @arrowdrive Anders On SQL: T-SQL Tuesday #72: Data modelling gone extremely wrong @rabryst Time After Time - An Introduction to Temporal Tables in SQL Server 2016 using a DeLorean @EdDebug [Deploy SSDT INSERTS in Batches @ALevyInROC Don’t Trust the Wizard @DBA_ANDY Nebraska SQL from @DBA_ANDY: T-SQL Tuesday #72 - Implicit Conversion Problems @eleightondick [SQL New Blogger Challenge: Week 1 recap @eleightondick [SQL New Blogger Challenge: Week 2 ideas @BeginTry [SQL Server 2012 Upgrade: The RPC Server is Unavailable

If you need to move data from one table into a new table, or even tables in a database into another database, the Import/Export Wizard in SQL Server Management Studio looks pretty tempting. Set up a source & destination, click a few buttons, kick back with a cup of tea and watch the progress bars, right? It turns out that the wizard just isn’t as smart as it may seem.

Ed Leighton-Dick has renewed his New Blogger Challenge this month. Here are all (I think) the posts for this week after Ed posted his announcement. If I’ve missed any, please let me know and I’ll update. Author Post @arrowdrive Anders On SQL: First Timer Summit impressions. @EdDebug [Deploy SSDT INSERTS in Batches @EdDebug [Looking at SSDT upgrade scripts @DBA_ANDY Nebraska SQL from @DBA_ANDY: PASS Summit 2015 Recap @eleightondick [PASS Summit 2015 Highlights @OliverAsmus [PASS Summit 2015: My Experience @EdDebug [ScriptDom Visualizer @eleightondick [SQL New Blogger Challenge: Looking back… and a new challenge!

Spend any time around a 4 year old, and you will inevitably find yourself involved in a conversation which evolves into this: Please do this thing Why? Reasonable answer Why? Restatement of reasonable answer Why? Shorter, more frustrated restatement of reasonable answer Why? Because that’s what has to be done Why? Because Why? I give up. Go ask your other parent It’s a simple, but powerful and important question. The trouble is that when it’s a 4 year old asking it, in a lot of cases they can’t understand the answer.