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Question of the Day

Another Typo

The Voice of the DBA

Aging in Technology

Every winter my wife flirts with the idea of returning to a corporate job and making more money. Winter is a slow time for horse training, and she gets bored and antsy. Horse training is physically hard, and as we talked about it last year, I said she should continue with horses for a few more years and then go back to a career later if she wanted.

Her response was that it would be much harder at 60 than 50. Perhaps, but I think her success in the business world and a strong set of skills wouldn't much matter, but I did get her point. I've had a few other people express similar concerns.

I had a good friend that spent most of his career in IT. He left the military and found a job with a large telecommunications company in Denver. He worked there for decades, raising three kids similar in age to my own. We chatted often at Scouts about life, technology, and kids. He was laid off a few years back, and as someone trying to find a new job in technology over the age of 50, he struggled to even get interviews. He spent a couple years looking and then mostly gave up, moving to other types of work at a much lower pay.

I wonder how many of you worry about employment as you get older. I know early in my career, it was the graybeards that were the most respected in the mainframe world. At some point, we started to look to the young hot shots working on PCs as the most respected technologists. I think we often look for younger, but not necessary young people when we hire. In fact, I spoke with someone recently that struggled to not discriminate against older people when they learned about ailments that a person might have.

I read some great thoughts from Dr. Greg Low that got me thinking about this. After all, I'm getting older, and much closer to the end of my career than the beginning. I think that I'm more willing to learn than most. I preach this to many of you, the idea that we need to keep learning. I'm very lucky that I have a job that encourages and allows me to learn on a regular basis.

I do think there is some ageism in the technology field. I also think there is a lot of pressure to reduce costs, so if you're not providing a a lot of value as a worker, why not replace you with a cheaper individual that can do the same job? At least, plenty of management thinks that way. I also think lots of hiring people that are younger think that health and stamina are lower and older people (or women) and feel they can't keep up.

The cloud and automation are changing the way more and more us approach our jobs. We need to have strong soft skills, in addition to technological ones, and we need to prove we can solve problems, not perform tasks by rote. Those simple things are getting automated in more and more places. While I don't think we'll get to the point that we dramatically automate away most jobs, DBA or developer, but the bar for skill and talent is being raised, especially when you look for a new job, so ensure you're regularly raising your bar.

Steve Jones - SSC Editor

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Featured Contents

A User-Defined Function returns more rows

aveek22 from SQLServerCentral

The Problem Recently, while working with one of my clients, I came across a script in which I had to introduce a scalar User-Defined Function in the SELECT statement. The SELECT used to return around 750K records. However, after introducing the UDF, the row count significantly increased to 826K. There were no other changes made […]

Building Machine Learning Models to Solve Practical Problems

Additional Articles from SimpleTalk

Machine learning is a skill that many data professionals are learning as they plan their careers over the next five to ten years. In this article, Supriya Pande gives an overview of machine learning and walks through a practical example.

Capturing the business value of Compliant Database DevOps

Site Owners from Redgate

You’ve probably heard of Compliant Database DevOps, but to take it from buzzword to boardroom relies on demonstrating value across your business. IT leaders must think more broadly than cost savings and ROI calculations when investing in scaling DevOps across database teams.
Our latest whitepaper explains how to lay the foundations for a successful DevOps implementation, and how to track success against global metrics that demonstrate your team’s impact across the business.

From the SQL Server Central Blogs - T-SQL Tuesday: Changing my mind

Diligentdba 46159 from Mala's Data Blog

This month’s T-SQL Tuesday is hosted by my friend across the pond – Alex Yates. Alex has a fantastic topic for us to blog about – he asks us...

From the SQL Server Central Blogs - SQL Homework – October 2019 – Code review (self and peer)

Kenneth.Fisher from SQLStudies

Every database person I’ve ever met writes at least some code at some point in their career. That code might ... Continue reading

Question of the Day

Today's question (by Steve Jones - SSC Editor):
	Another Typo
I am creating more test data. I accidentally execute this set of statements in SSMS. INSERT dbo.Claim ( PharmNo, ClaimNo, ClaimDate ) VALUES ( 'LMNOP', '999', GETDATE() ) GO 5 SELECT * FROM dbo.Claim AS c GO What happens?
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)

Just a few rows

I have a small table with a few rows of data in SQL Server 2017:

CREATE TABLE [dbo].[Sales]
(
[SalesWeek] [int] NULL,
[SaleTotal] [money] NULL
) ON [PRIMARY]
GO
INSERT INTO Sales
VALUES
( 1, 50.0000 ), 
( 2, 70.0000 ), 
( 3, 100.0000 ), 
( 4, 60.0000 ), 
( 5, 30.0000 ), 
( 6, 120.0000 ), 
( 7, 40.0000 ), 
( 8, 80.0000 ), 
( 9, 90.0000 ), 
( 10, 92.0000 ), 
( 11, 89.0000 )

I decide to run this query:

SELECT 
 *
 FROM dbo.Sales
 ORDER BY SalesWeek
 OFFSET 10 ROWS

How many rows are returned?

Answer: 1

Explanation: When we offset by 10 rows, we skip the first 10 rows. This means the 11th row is the first one. As there are only 11 rows, only 1 row is returned. Ref: ORDER BY - https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/t-sql/queries/select-order-by-clause-transact-sql?view=sql-server-2017

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 2017 - Administration

CI/CD on Azure - Data Factory - I'm having all sorts of strife trying to deploy a Data Factory (V2) from QA to Production. I'm guessing that there are plenty of people around here who have got their teeth into this. Would anyone be prepared to have a bit of an e-mail conversation with me about their experiences with custom parameter templates, […]

Availability Group creation on SQL2017 only has 2 options - Hi, I want to create an availability group in SQL2017 with "Windows Server Failover Cluster". However this option is missing in the "Specify Availability Group Options" section. I can only choose EXTERNAL or NONE. Anyone who can point me to the reason why this is like this? :/ I have already enabled Failover Cluster feature […]

SQL Server 2016 - Administration

slower disk performance with VMWARE versus physical - Kind of open ended question but having issues with clearly degraded disk performance with our sql servers running on vmware versus physical. Anyone with past experience with this issue have any places to look?

SQL Server 2016 - Development and T-SQL

node 1 slower than node 2 - We have a clustered sql server, 2016 SP2/CU1, enterprise, with 2 nodes. There is a c# job running that spins off 200+ parallel processes which calls a large stored procedure. When node 1 is active, the calls to the stored procedure fail with timeout expired on a specific query (a select that we know this […]

Subqueries - My Question is what is the best way to learn subqueries? And why are they referred to as dynamic queries? Thanks

Add row number column based on id and stages - Hello Everyone I have a table with customer ids and different stages a customer can be in starting with A , B , C and D each starting at different dates Now a customer can be in multiple stages and I want to group them as below example (column rownum) Basically this determines the batch […]

Administration - SQL Server 2014

How to randomly select 10% of the rows from a table - I need to extract randomly to select 10% of the rows from a table. Kindly advise how to write the t-SQL.

Transaction Log Shipping (No direct link) - A vendor provides a service whereby they keep a database up to date daily utilising transaction logs. They configure Transaction logs at there end to backup to a location to which we can obtain these files. How would I set up the secondary database given that the primary and secondary can not see each other. […]

Development - SQL Server 2014

redistribute by total dollar value (not by count) - Table X: Consumer bigint (PK) CurrentGroup bigint DollarValue money I want to redistribute records in the above table to 4 different groups (currently not in table X) equally by the sum of the DollarValue (not a record count). Table X can have up to 5,000 records with a dollar value ranging from $10.00 to $10,000.00 […]

Extracting certain numbers from a string - Hi Guys, if object_id('tempdb..#Equipment') is not null drop table #equipment create table #equipment (Category varchar(20), ItemNumber varchar(30), ExpectedResult float) insert into #equipment (Category, ItemNumber, ExpectedResult) values ('Cable', 'CB1/03BAE300FT', 300), ('Cable', 'CB1/03BAE050FT', 50), ('Cable', 'CB1/04BAE100FT', 100), ('Cable', 'CB1/04BAE150FT', 150), ('Cable', 'CB1/04BAE025FT', 25), ('Cable', 'CB1/04BAE050FT', 50), ('Cable', 'CB1/04BAE075FT', 75), ('Cable', 'CB1/04CNN050FT', 50), ('Cable', 'CB10/5BAE1000FT', 1000), ('Cable', 'CB10/5BAE100FT', […]

SQL 2012 - General

Single Instance vs Multiple Instances - Hi. I have 22 databases with the exact same structure (1 per client). They range in size from 500 MB to 700 GB. Right now all 22 are on the same instance of SQL 2012. The resources are 170 GB memory and 12 processors. Environment is Hyper-V. All VMs are stored on SAN. All data […]

SQL Server 2012 - T-SQL

Table Function becomes slow - Hi folks, I have a 2012 sql and it works very fast, one of the most used queries is a table function. This function over time becomes slow and heavy. If I add OPTION (HASH JOIN) the function is again fast (maybe faster), but only for a couple of days. I leave you an example […]

SQL Server 2008 - General

Same Table Example - This is an oversimplified example of an issue I'm having. I'd like to not change the table #data. The error is the object already exists. Msg 2714, Level 16, State 1, Line 13 There is already an object named '#Data' in the database. IF OBJECT_ID('tempdb..#Data') IS NOT NULL DROP TABLE #Data IF EXISTS (SELECT 1 […]

Reporting Services

SSRS Expression Help - I need assistance with the following requirements: I need the font on my text to equal "DimGray" when IsRunning = "Processing" else if the MostRecent.Value > today = Red else Green. With what I have below, its making them all DimGray. =Switch(Fields!IsRunning.Value ="Processing" , "DimGray", IIF(Fields!MostRecent.Value >= TODAY(), "GREEN", "RED"))

Integration Services

SSIS Excel Import Error - Hello, I'm an SSIS newcomer, but, far as I can tell, have done everything correctly. In a nutshell, I need to search a folder for Excel files and bring them into a table on the server. I also need to add a SheetName field as well as a FileName field. These 2 fields are ready […]

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