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Finding Motivation

I ran across a tweet (are they still tweets?) on X/Twitter that was titled: how to ruin yourself. It had these items, which seem to be coming from a young person. Either a student or in their first job.

  1. Stay on your phone all day.
  2. Feel sad for no clear reason.
  3. Stop eating well and ignore your studies.
  4. Sleep super late and wake up in the afternoon.
  5. Let sadness take over everything.
  6. Always look at others' lives and feel yours isn't enough.
  7. Keep blaming yourself for the past but never try to let it go.
  8. Compare your progress with people who started years before you.
  9. Get stuck imagining outcomes instead of creating them.
  10. Keep waiting for motivation instead of building discipline.

What was interesting to me is I saw people doing similar things when I was younger. Either adults with careers or fellow students. I'd change "sad" to "anger", which I saw a lot in the 80s. Replace the phone with TV, as I saw lots of people start to invest a lot of time in TV with the growth of cable and 24-hour channels in the early 80s. Eating well was less of a thing, but drinking more was a thing. However, many people stagnated, or maybe ruined, themselves in similar ways.

What things motivate you? What gets you to become better at, well, anything you want. From your career to a new career to a better parent or coach or friend? What gets you away from short-term enjoyment (or wallowing) into action?

I write about working on your career on a regular basis, but I'll summarize my advice for making a better you:

  1. Be curious about the world
  2. Dream of something better
  3. Make a plan to realize a dream
  4. Give up some leisure time
  5. Make adult decisions
  6. Be Kind to Yourself

I'll try to expand on each of these on my blog over time. The list are things I try to do to make changes in my life. Whether at Redgate, while coaching, or even improving a hobby skill. I have to invest a bit of myself to get something back.

Though the journey is by far the most satisfying part.

Steve Jones - SSC Editor

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 Featured Contents
SQLServerCentral Article

Fixing "Login failed for user" error in SQL Server

Dinesh Karunarathna from SQLServerCentral

In this article, I am going to explain fixing a problem related login failure error with SQL Server. The Problem One of the common error in the SQL Server error log is "Login failed for user 'DomainName\ServerName$'. Reason: Could not find a login matching the name provided. [CLIENT: ]". Even though it says that […]

External Article

Preparing SQL Servers and Data for Quantum Computing

Additional Articles from MSSQLTips.com

Just like advances in artificial intelligence, I have heard that quantum computing is going to be a disruptive technology for our future. For instance, there’s the concern that it’s going to break/crack a lot of network encryption and potentially data encryption. What’s going to be affected, how long do we have, and what do I (and my organization) need to do to prepare for it?

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From the SQL Server Central Blogs - T-SQL Tuesday #193 – A Note to Your Past, and a Warning from Your Future

DesertDBA from The Desert DBA

I haven’t posted in a while (well, not here at least since I’ve been posting at the Straight Path Solutions site recently), but I did want to reply to...

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From the SQL Server Central Blogs - Patch Tuesday – Where to get more information

K. Brian Kelley from Databases – Infrastructure – Security

For a number of years I have subscribed to Randy Franklin Smith's Patch Tuesday newsletter. It tends to hit my inbox in the wee hours of Wednesday.

Architecting Power BI Solutions in Microsoft Fabric

Steve Jones - SSC Editor from SQLServerCentral

Business Intelligence (BI) tools like Power BI are used by a wide range of professionals, creating diverse and complex scenarios, and finding the right solution can be daunting, especially when multiple approaches exist for a single use case. The author distills his 17 years of experience on various data platform technologies in this book to walk you through various Power BI usage scenarios.

 

 Question of the Day

Today's question (by Steve Jones - SSC Editor):

 

The Last Binary Value of the Year

What does this code return? 
SELECT cast(0x2025 AS NVARCHAR(20))
Image 1: Image 2: Image 3: Image 4:

Think you know the answer? Click here, and find out if you are right.

 

 

 Yesterday's Question of the Day (by Steve Jones - SSC Editor)

The Large Encoded Value

I want to use the new BASE64_ENCODE() function in SQL Server 2025, but return a string that isn't large type. What is the longest varbinary string I can pass in and still get a varchar(8000) returned?

Answer: 6000 bytes

Explanation: Inputs of up to 6000 bytes return a varchar(8000). Larger inputs return a varchar(max). Ref: BASE64_ENCODE - https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/t-sql/functions/base64-encode-transact-sql?view=fabric-sqldb&viewFallbackFrom=sql-server-ver17

Discuss this question and answer on the forums

 

 

 

Database Pros Who Need Your Help

Here's a few of the new posts today on the forums. To see more, visit the forums.

SQL Server 2019 - Administration
Intermittent Service Freezes and "State 23" Authentication Failure - Environment: SQL Server: 2019 Enterprise (15.0.4430.1) OS: Windows Server 2022 Standard (Build 20348) Virtualization: QEMU/KVM (Standard PC Q35 + ICH9) Security: Bitdefender GravityZone Authentication: Active Directory Domain Account The Problem: I am experiencing a recurring issue where SQL Server intermittently stops responding to queries. The service remains in a "Running" state, but all new and […]
i noticed the sqlhealth extende event is on by default , so can i reduce - hi, i noticed the sqlhealth extended event is on by default , and it logs many thing, Q1) can i reduce few thing so that file size and recording that is wirting from buffer to file can be reduced, thus i will save some resources. q2) and can i add few events which are required […]
SQL Server 2019 - Development
data type gets lost in data flow - Hi, in a simple oledb source->derived column->oledb destination    data flow, 2 of my date columns that are converted to varchar, format 101,  in the source view, ultimately seem to end up as unicode in the oledb destination.   And that seems to bring down the pkg.  everywhere else they are dt_str length of 30 . […]
SQL Azure - Administration
New-AzSqlInstanceServerTrustCertificate - Failed and no clues - Using New-AzSqlInstanceServerTrustCertificate to import a certificate and get the message New-AzSqlInstanceServerTrustCertificate: Long running operation failed with status 'Failed'. Additional Info:'An unexpected error occured while processing the request. Tracking ID: 'd21c42cd-515c-40b4-b8b6-60b851c66a39' I've confirmed that the parameters are correct and most articles I've looked at suggest just waiting and trying again. Needless to say, that hasn't worked. […]
Editorials
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Article Discussions by Author
Stairway to Azure SQL Hyperscale Level 6: Backup and Restore Internals - Comments posted to this topic are about the item Stairway to Azure SQL Hyperscale Level 6: Backup and Restore Internals
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Working with JSON/JSONB Data in PostgreSQL using Python - Comments posted to this topic are about the item Working with JSON/JSONB Data in PostgreSQL using Python
SQL Server 2022 - Administration
SQL Server audit with windows ad group - I am trying to create a filter on a SQL Server audit to capture actions of the members of a Windows AD group. The audit filter allows you to include a filter such as where server_principal_name = 'domain\user_name' Using this filter I included a Windows AD group name, but the audit captures nothing. The audit […]
Deadlock graph anomaly - I've come across what appears to be a strange deadlock anomaly. As seen in the attached image/XML, a typical deadlock is shown (bottom), but then a completely isolated process graph is also shown (top). The top section has appeared in multiple deadlocks on different unrelated databases/app processes. It doesn't appear to be involved in the […]
 

 

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