T-SQL Tuesday #22 is history, and I was pleased by the many posts and participants in this month’s September blog party, originally started by our friend SQL MVP Adam Machanic blog|twitter. He came up with the idea of improving community involvement via blogging where bloggers around the world post their views on a same topic chosen by the host on the 2nd Tuesday of every month. I received positive feedback, on-line and off-line, about this T-SQL Tuesday.
So, it’s time for our T-SQL Tuesday round-up and review of all our blog entries on our topic of the month, data-presentation. In the original invite, I asked the SQL Community, to blog about the importance of formatting data to the end-user. No matter what the code looked like behind the scenes, we must generate results and reports that are easily readable and understandable by the, often non-technical, end-user. In many instances, such as the example I provided, formatting your code may be helpful in outputting a quality end-product.
Since the topic was broad with no specific requirements, we have some interesting, creative and detailed posts. Some were technical, some non-technical, but all good quality contributions.
Rob Farley, being on the other side of the world and such, was one of the early contributors, talking about “Pie Charts – could try harder” and the importance of presenting data using effective visualization techniques.
Noel McKinney, who maintains his site, Noel NOT Null, (another early poster) writes about an experience where the separation of data and presentation was violated (Why have the heavens not darkened? :-P) He had a new boss come in and asked him to remove the leading zeros from all numeric values – in the database! Read Noel on Data Presentation.
Bob Pusateri, aka SQLBob, of his blog series, The Outer Join (who hosted a T-SQL Tuesday recently himself), relates his story to data presentation and takes the liberty of extending this to include other computers so he can tell all about what he calls “Pseudo-XML”.
Amit Banjeree, who maintains, TroubleShootingSQL.com, blogs about Data Presentation and the Mask of Zorro in a very interesting post. Amit compares raw data to visual representation of the data.
Matt Nelson, at NelsonsWeb.net, discusses reporting using Cognos, which can render reports that create the same presentation layer, independent of which database platform you use. Whether its Oracle, SQL Server, or MySQL, the end-user will see the same unified report.
Robert Mathew Cook, aka SQLMashup, submitted his data presentation contribution here, talks about presents, tiers and tools, to make end-user presentation. He mentions other T-SQL such as Using GROUP BY with ROLLUP, CUBE, and GROUPING SETS, as well as multi-tier and .NET application architecture.
Sebastian Meine, of Sqlity shows us how to implement string concatenation in T-SQL, using XML. He offers a detailed step-by-step method. Read More….
Bradley Ball, aka SQLBalls, gives us some nice code examples and good explanations. He also took my cue, and introduced his own CTE J Brad’s take is unformatted code would be a nightmare to read through, and good coding standards are a habit that you want to get into. Read More…
OK! I think I got all of your posts summarized. (If I missed anyone, do let me know :-O). We definitely have a nice array of various articles and entries, and truly want to thank everyone here for all their contributions, and taking time out to participate in this T-SQL Tuesday #22.
Again, I want to thank Adam for pinging me and giving me the opportunity to host! Hope you all enjoyed this month’s blog party. Tune in next month for another fun topic!
Have a great topic? Remember, you too can host, just reach out and contact Adam directly.
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