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Featured Contents

Question of the Day

Checking the Date

The Voice of the DBA

Daily Coping Tip

Eat good food that makes you happy

I also have a thread at SQLServerCentral dealing with coping mechanisms and resources. Feel free to participate.

For many of you out there working in a new way, I'm including a thought of the day on how to cope in this challenging time from The Action for Happiness Coping Calendar. My items will be on my blog, feel free to share yours.

Useless Hackathons

I participated in a few coding competitions in high school, where we got together for a day with a team and tried to build software to solve a problem. They were challenging and exciting, but exhausting. Not something I'd want to do often.

A number of corporations have tried hackathons as a way to find internal innovation and inspire employees. Getting a day, or a few days, to build some software that might change an organization can be exciting, but the events are not without some drawbacks.

I've liked the idea of us doing this at Redgate, with our Down Tools Week, but the CIO of TD Ameritrade finds hackathons useless. The reasons he gives makes sense, and they are problems I've seen in various organizations when employees want to build something new, without necessarily understanding the problem or having the resources to complete their work. I mostly agree that unbounded hackathons are problematic, and having some evaluation of ideas is important.

It's hard to be innovative constantly in an organization when you have pressures and deadlines to complete work. At the same time, it can be easy for an entire development department to stagnate because writing software to close out tickets someone else has submitted can reduce incentives to build great software. The ideas in the TD Ameritrade piece are good, allowing a team to be sure developers aren't solving a problem that's been evaluated, or choosing a solution that is impractical. I like the idea of funding ideas and increasing that over time if ideas show potential.

Ultimately there are often lots of ideas on how to solve a problem with software, but we rarely work in a vacuum. Our solutions have to fit within an existing structure and have a ROI that makes sense to the organization. Whether we sell software or support some other business, we are trying to achieve those goals, not just solve the problem in the most satisfying manner. Too often I think software developers sometimes forget there are goals other than just producing code that completes a task. Usually those goals are furthering the organization in some way beyond the software.

Steve Jones - SSC Editor

Join the debate, and respond to today's editorial on the forums

Featured Contents

Azure Storage: Blob and Data Lake Storage Gen2

Sucharita Das from SQLServerCentral

Introduction Azure Storage is the service for storing different types of data. A storage account is created first. The storage account provides a unique namespace for different types of Azure storage data accessible from anywhere in the world over HTTP or HTTPS. Data in the Azure storage account is durable and highly available, secure, and […]

How Can Redgate Tools Help with a Cloud Migration?

Additional Articles from Redgate

The cloud migration tools and processes that will help you move a database to the cloud, from planning, implementation and validation through to extending existing development and deployment processes to the new cloud platform.

How to Find Unused Databases in SQL Server

Additional Articles from MSSQLTips.com

In this article we look at how to identify if SQL Server databases are not being used and a process to take these unused databases offline.

From the SQL Server Central Blogs - SQL Homework – June 2021 – SQL Audits

Kenneth.Fisher from SQLStudies

Last month I had you work on Extended Events, so hopefully now you are a bit more comfortable with them. ... Continue reading

From the SQL Server Central Blogs - Blog post about Copying Azure files to SharePoint, comparing Logic App and Power Automate Flow for this, and Trust No One

Rayis Imayev from Data Adventures

(2021-May-31) Recently, I created a prototype solution for one of the projects, that would copy data files from Azure to SharePoint location. The task is trivial, doesn't require a lot...

Question of the Day

Today's question (by Steve Jones - SSC Editor):
	Checking the Date
I run this query: DECLARE @d DATETIME2 = SYSDATETIME(); SELECT @d; This the result: 2021-06-12 12:13:54.0854894 Now I run this: SELECT ISDATE('2021-06-12 12:13:54.0854894') What is returned?
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)

Write-Debug

If I use the Write-Debug cmdlet, how do I get output to the console?

Answer: Set $DebugPreference to Continue

Explanation: The $DebugPreference variable is used to get output. If set to Continue or Stop, then output is returned to the console from these statements. Ref: Write-Debug - https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/microsoft.powershell.utility/write-debug?view=powershell-7.1

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

Huge Table archive from One server to Another server - Hi All, I have a huge table of DataSpace 200 GB data and 450 GB of Index Space, Compression type is ColumnStore. Currently, I am using a power shell script with SqlbulkCopy Object to copy the data with a batch size of 10000. As the destination table size grows the copy is becoming slower and […]

SQL Server 2017 - Development

Insert data using view - Hello! I have to create a view called Customer_Age. I need to pick distinct birth year values from Customer table. Then using that I need to calculate Age as per today. And based on Age, I need to calculate Age group, Group Name etc. The data should look like: How do I create a […]

SQL Server 2016 - Administration

reconfiguring tempdb - hi folks i have a sql server that has 15 tempdb files split over 2 drives, and autogrowth of 10mb or 64 mb depending on location the server has only access to 8 cpu's. i want to reduce the files to 8, size them up equally with plenty of space and put them all onto […]

Trans Log backups not running - I set up 2 servers with AG and a secondary is readonly. SQLSERVER 2016 on Windows 2016 Everything is up, AG is synced up and data comes back. The odd part is the databases in the AG won't take a trans log backup? I can run the statement, but nothing happens. It doesn't come up […]

SQL Server 2016 - Development and T-SQL

How to Query Arrays with T-SQL - Hello Community, Can someone let me know how to query Array with T-SQL? For example, for the sample table below I would like to query the field 'ce_data' to find the following: where applicationSubmittedData = 2021-05-17 and applicationType = personal and deceasedDiedEngOrWales = No The sample data is as follows: CREATE TABLE #tmpTable ( ce_data […]

Recursive query problem - find ALL related records for a given record - I'm stumped but confident that there's a solution. I'm hoping someone can help. I need a way to find all of the related records in a set of relationships given any record ID in the set. The nature of the relationships is variable. The 'happy path' is that the relationships represent a simple 'daisy-chain' where […]

SQL 2012 - General

How to update generated number field with number to every group from 1 to 4 ? - I work on SQL server 2012 I face issue I need to update Generated Number on table test to get UNIQUE number to every group id from 1 to 4 so first group from groupid 1 to 4 will be as 1000 so second group from groupid 1 to 4 will be as 1001 so […]

SQL Server 2019 - Administration

log shipping LSAlert showing false error - We updated our production servers from SQL 2016 to SQL 2019 over the weekend, and we setup log shipping between our main SQL Server instance and our BI server... log shipping seems to be working as expected - logs are getting backed up on the primary and restored on the secondary, no errors, and I've […]

SQL Server 2019 - Development

SQL If not null then insert N - Is there a way to write a line into a SQL so that the column only shows a N if there is something in the field it is reading from? i.e. PERSON.TERMINATION_DATE, Only want this column to show an N if there is a termination date.

XML Parsing - Unable to switch encodiing using utf-8 when casting from NVARCHAR - Hi there I have a piece of code which takes an input parameter of NVARCHAR(Max) and then attempts to cast it to XML as follows declare @DataSheetXML NVARCHAR(max) declare @DataSheetXML2 xml set @DataSheetXML = N' ' set @DataSheetXML2= CONVERT(XML,CONVERT(NVARCHAR(MAX),@DataSheetXML)) This fails because I get the following error message: Msg 9402, […]

SQL Server 2008 - General

Help with SUBSTRING CHARINDEX - I have a field that coonsistently has data in this style: (b) Joe Brown -12563, (a) Mary Edwards -15425 I need to pull out only the name. I have the below which will pull out the name but it won't trim the space, hyphen, and number off. Any ideas? SUBSTRING([AGENT],CHARINDEX(')', [AGENT])+1, LEN([AGENT])-CHARINDEX(')', [AGENT])) name

Lock table for Insert/Update/delete - I am using SQL Sever 2008. I want to lock the whole table for insert/delete/update operation,but should allow other users to read. can anyone please suggest How to lock SQL table from insert/delete/update, but allow read , until certain operation is completed on that table ?

SSRS 2012

SSRS required services - Good day to all. I would like to know what are the ff. required services on SSRS2012? My acquired service unit has a pre-installed MSSQL 2012 from the previous developer. Is there a testing port after activating/installing the report service. Appreciate your kind help.

Powershell

Can't reach site to install MS Reporting Services Tools - Hello experts, I found what seems like the perfect set of tools that I need to migrate reports from one SSRS instance to another. The info I used is here: https://www.mssqltips.com/sqlservertip/4738/powershell-commands-for-sql-server-reporting-services/ The first step is to install the tools using this command in PowerShell: Install-Module -Name ReportingServicesTools However, I get this message when I try […]

Integration Services

SSIS executing older child package - Dear all, I have a weird problem. Our client has in the MS SQL Server Integration Services Catalog, a parent Package deployed. That package calls some child packages using the Execute Package Task and calls the child ssis from the filesystem. I changed the child package, but it seems the parent package executes the previous […]

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