William Shakespeare once wrote in the play Romeo and Juliet: “What's in a name? That which we call a rose, by any other word would smell as sweet.” It is a beautiful sentiment in that context, and even still you might say that there is some truth to this saying in a lot of ways. […]
2023-11-04
1,785 reads
Today, I want to blog about something I have only limited knowledge of … confidence. Okay, I understand what confidence is, and I have seen it before in the real world and not just in biographical movies. In fact, I have met quite a few highly confident people. In almost every case, it was immediately […]
2023-10-07
94 reads
When most people were young, they had someone telling them to "Mind your manners." Such classics as: "Keep your elbows off of the table," "Use a fork," "Put on deodorant," as well as "Don't chew with your mouth open" were bandied about like there were laws of nature. However, manners differ significantly from laws in […]
2023-08-12
143 reads
The other day, I was in a Twitter discussion interviewing people for technical positions. This reminded me of one of my favorite things to do in interviews… reading the list of qualifications/skills and asking questions about its contents. If you put it on the resume, I assume you know something about it and are willing […]
2023-07-15
142 reads
As computer scientists, it often feels like our job is to tell the business user, "No, we can't do that because the software you asked for, and we built, doesn't allow it ..." Then, after a long and relatively silly meeting where your soul dies a little, the business user typically gets 80% of what […]
2023-06-10
106 reads
An old sport saying goes like this “I could beat them with one arm tied behind my back.” Well, after six weeks with my arm in a sling, I am in awe of whoever tries that because everything is a lot harder. Like washing your hand and then drying it, becomes more of a challenge […]
2023-05-20
103 reads
Several years ago, I was brought in on a project to review a database design. I was provided a time for a meeting. No written requirements were available, but I generally knew what the system was supposed to do. No before/after schema images showed what was being changed were available. Still, I was assured that […]
2023-03-25
116 reads
The first time I spoke in front of a group of people over 20 years ago about a programming topic, I was scared to death. I could barely sleep the night before, obsessing about the material and practicing it repeatedly. When I finally did sleep, it felt like minutes before I awoke, and it was […]
2023-02-25
94 reads
Fear and aging. Two of the things that most human beings have in common is that we are scared and getting older. Most of us we fear getting older, but that is a very different conversation altogether. I want to talk about the fear of what if. Today I have two things I am keenly […]
2023-02-06 (first published: 2023-01-28)
234 reads
Practice makes perfect:” right? Well, not exactly. The reality of it all is that this saying is an untrustworthy aphorism. I discovered this in my “younger” days when I was a passionate tennis player, practicing and playing 20+ hours a week. No matter what my passion level was, without some serious coaching (and perhaps a […]
2021-08-14
251 reads
By Steve Jones
It’s Prime Day. A few of my recommendations, since I want to do some...
With Fabric Mirroring, Microsoft is promoting a nice and appealing story for operational reporting...
If you’ve been watching AI roll through the data community and thinking, “this seems...
Comments posted to this topic are about the item SQL Art, Part 4: Happy...
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Concurrency and Baseline Control: Level...
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Spending Time in the Office
I have this code on SQL Server 2022. What happens when it runs all at once?
DROP TABLE IF EXISTS dbo.Commission GO CREATE TABLE dbo.Commission (id INT NOT NULL IDENTITY(1,1) CONSTRAINT CommissionPK PRIMARY KEY , salesperson VARCHAR(20) , commission VARCHAR(20) ) GO INSERT dbo.Commission ( salesperson, commission) VALUES ( 'Brian', 12 ), ( 'Brian', 'None' ) GOSee possible answers