Taking it back to SQL 101 today because I recently saw something that floored me. I’m a big fan of temp tables. I use ’em all over the place to stash intermediate results, break a dataset down into more manageable chunks, or even share them between procedures. And as it turns out, there’s more than one way to create them.

The Traditional Way

If you’re planning out your temp table usage, you’re probably creating them just like any other table, then populating them.

For the second consecutive year, I will be speaking at SQL Saturday Albany 2020 on July 25th, 2020. I will be presenting “Keys to a Healthy Relationship with SQL Server” at 3:30 PM.

Abstract

Developers and DBAs have had a long, sometimes strained relationship. Some developers see DBAs as roadblocks standing in the way of getting their work shipped; some DBAs see developers as agents of chaos bent on ruining their perfect database environments.

T-SQL Tuesday is a monthly blog party hosted by a different community blogger each month, and this month Kenneth Fisher (blog | twitter) asks us for non-SQL tips & tricks.

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How about for this months TSQL Tuesday let’s do another month of tips and tricks. But just to be a bit different, nothing to do with SQL Server (in fact let’s say nothing related to a DBMS). No SSMS tricks, no T-SQL tips, something completely unrelated. For example did you know that, in Windows, if you grab a window and shake it then all of the other windows will be minimized? And then if you shake it again they all pop back up.

Setting up a home office can be a daunting task. Doubly so when you don’t get an opportunity to plan it out and you have to set things up with no warning and items on hand. Since starting to work from home on March 17th, my desk has been through 3 major versions.

A word of warning: I struggle to keep a tidy desk, and I didn’t clean up before taking the pictures seen here.

It turns out I was doing this all wrong for months.

For the longest time, I’ve been checking my SQL Server instances to see what needs patching with Test-DbaBuild from the dbatools PowerShell module. But the result was always the same - it never returned a Service Pack or Cumulative Update target. I glossed over it because I knew what the right answer was already, but recently I decided that wasn’t good enough. We need a reliable report to give to other people.

We’re at least five weeks into this thing here in New York and while there are some encouraging signs, it’s more likely than not that “non-essential” workers aren’t at the halfway point yet. I’m preparing myself for a few more months, both mentally and in terms of my workspace. Here are a few resources that might help you as you settle into doing this long-term.

Written

Scott Hanselman’s Remote Work blog category. Scott has been a remote employee at Microsoft for over a decade, writing (and speaking) about it with some regularity.

A little while ago, Ray Kim (blog | twitter) asked a few folks who organize SQL Saturday events a few questions for his blog. The results are in and he’s compiled them all into one big post.

Check it out: What goes into organizing a #SQLSaturday? From the words of #SQLFamily

Settle in folks, this is a long, rambling post.

As this goes live, it’s been about three weeks since my abrupt switch from driving to the office every day to working from home full-time. This shift happened at the same time my kids had school cancelled, and our lives got flipped, turned upside down. So I’d like to take a minute, just sit right there, and I’ll tell you how I…am dealing with all this.

This tripped me up a few weeks ago, but once I stopped and thought about for a moment it made total sense. I was trying to copy some data into a temp table and got an error I’d never encountered before.

Column, parameter, or variable #1: Cannot find data type MyStringType.

What’s that all about? Let’s find out.

Why User-Defined Types?

I’ve never been a fan of user-defined types (UDT). They definitely have applications, but there’s also a temptation to use them to “standardize” things like string lengths or decimal field precision across a whole database. On the surface, that seems like a good idea. But these can cause trouble as well. Not right-sizing your fields can lead to data quality and query performance problems.

This is one of several posts on modernizing T-SQL code with new features and functionality available in SQL Server.

Last year, you finally retired the last of your SQL Server 2008R2 instances. Congratulations! But are you taking advantage of everything that your new instances have to offer? Unless you did a review of all of the T-SQL in your applications, I’m guessing not.

This one seems pretty basic, but it’s got a trick up its sleeve - the TRIM() function.