The case for "Understanding our business" training
Today we have a guest editorial reminding us that business knowledge is important, and we could all use some training.
2025-11-19
130 reads
David Poole
- Interests: Badminton, Cycling and Music. Keen piano player.
Why Standards are Important
There is something in the tech mindset that simultaneously loves and loathes a standard. Having standards is important, what those standards are is less so.
2025-01-22
2,330 reads
An introduction to Terraform
As a Data Engineer I found myself having to learn rather more about cloud infrastructure than I had expected.
2024-12-02
3,625 reads
NOSQL and RDBMSs
NOSQL and RDBMS are evolving and absorbing ideas from each other. Is this necessarily a good thing? Perhaps we should think again
2024-06-14 (first published: 2015-08-27)
867 reads
JQ - Tool for Querying JSON documents using the CLI
Learn how you can query JSON data from a CLI to check it before importing the data into a database.
2024-02-16
8,134 reads
Managing Change
Time has brought clarity for changes which could and should have been provided by its instigators. We compare a change where clarity was sought to those that were chaotic and the approaches that were taken at their two poles.
2023-08-16
1,481 reads
Using pre-commit to prevent simple mistakes
Git hooks are a useful way of triggering code quality scripts. The pre-commit tool provides us with a way of doing this and tapping into the huge library of scripts already in existence to ensure our code complies with general linting and formatting good practice.
2023-01-13
6,436 reads
Design your systems and processes for auditability
I have worked in more than one regulated industry, and since the banking crisis of 2008, I have witnessed a sea change in the approach to regulation. The UK Financial Services Authority (FSA) was seen to be a toothless tiger. The UK government replaced the FSA with two separate bodies, each with its own more […]
2021-10-25
1,582 reads
PostGres and SQL Server - Divided by a common language
A few lessons from a SQL Server DBA that is working on PostgreSQL. David Poole tells us where the similarities in the platforms can cause problems.
2021-07-30
4,072 reads
Documentation. The Under Recognised Skill
Documentation may not be something we aspire to do, but it is a valuable skill.
2021-04-30
426 reads
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Forums
Adding and Dropping Columns II
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Leveraging DuckDB for OLAP Workloads: The Fabric Modern Data Platform
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More Documentation is Needed
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Question of the Day
Adding and Dropping Columns II
I have this table in my SQL Server 2022 database:
CREATE TABLE [dbo].[CityList] ( [CityNameID] [int] NOT NULL IDENTITY(1, 1), [CityName] [varchar] (30) , [Country2] [char] (3), [stateprovince2] [char] (2), [Country] [char] (3), [stateprovince] [char] ) ON [PRIMARY] GOI decide to drop the stateprovince2 and country2 columns. What code should I use? See possible answers