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Why you should not use SELECT *
A shorter post this week, but an important one. Last week, Erik Darling commented on my post saying that we shouldn’t use SELECT *, which was both amusing and accurate. Amusing, because a number of the example T-SQL queries in that post made use of this construct. Why not? Why was Erik’s comment accurate? A[…]
Don’t do these things in SQL Server
Recently Brent Ozar posted a link to the PostgreSQL “Don’t do this” page, which I am shamelessly reproducing below, re-tailored for a SQL Server audience. Don’t use -P with sqlcmd sqlcmd is a cross-platform interactive command-line utility that allows you to connect to a SQL Server (or Azure SQL Database) instance and perform database operations.[…]
Repair SQL Server on Linux after an Ubuntu distribution upgrade
SQL Server 2017 is supported on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Long-Term Support), however that version of Ubuntu Linux is now more than two years old, so you may be tempted to update Ubuntu to a more modern release such as Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver). Unfortunately (as of this writing), SQL Server 2017 is not supported[…]
Data lakes and swamps, oh my
I was lamenting to my friend and fellow MVP Shamir Charania (blog | Twitter) that I didn’t have a topic for this week’s blog post, so he and his colleague suggested I write about data lakes, and specifically Azure Data Lake. What is a data lake? This is what Wikipedia says: A data lake is[…]
Performance as a feature, software developer edition
Relational database management systems (RDBMS) like SQL Server and Azure SQL Database are very good at managing normalized data. Efficient storage and retrieval of data is the name of the game, so performance is a feature. That’s why SQL Server (and other RDBMS products in the market) keep as much of the data in memory[…]
Community recognition
On the first day of January 2017, I was honoured to receive an email naming me as a Microsoft MVP in the Data Platform category. In the previous couple of months leading up to that, I had been contacted by Microsoft about the process, based primarily on this very blog you are reading. I’ve been[…]
Update your production servers and stop making excuses about it
Folks, we all like to make sure we’re doing our level best to make things work smoothly. So why am I staring at someone’s server that has never been updated since it was first set up almost three years ago? Do better, so that I don’t have to yell at you. Seriously. When we ignore[…]
Dates and Times in SQL Server: DATENAME()
Last time we looked at DATEPART(). This post is all about the DATENAME() function. So many similarities There are many similarities between DATEPART and DATENAME. Where DATEPART returns the date or time part as an integer, DATENAME returns the part as a character string. This DATENAME function also takes two parameters: the date or time[…]
Dates and Times in SQL Server: DATEPART()
In my previous posts in this series we’ve seen reference to Transact-SQL (T-SQL) functions that are used to get the specific part of a date and/or time (year, month, day, hour, minute, second, etc.). This week we’ll go through one of them and see how it works. Introducing DATEPART, a built-in function that takes two[…]
T-SQL aside: replace PRINT with RAISERROR
I was minding my own business innocently reading a blog post by Erik Darling, when this tip smacked me in the proverbial forehead. I even learned something that had always bothered me but had been too lazy to investigate further. Tip #4: Know Your Place Don’t be afraid to use RAISERROR to mark off sections[…]