This month's T-SQL Tuesday is hosted by Sebastian Meine (blog | twitter) and the topic is joins. He has a whole month worth of topics about joins: A Join A Day – Introduction. My blog post is about something weird I encountered while I was converting some old Oracle code to T-SQL (I encounter all sorts of weird stuff in Oracle code, but let’s stay on topic).
This is an archive of the posts published to LessThanDot from 2008 to 2018, over a decade of useful content. While we're no longer adding new content, we still receive a lot of visitors and wanted to make sure the content didn't disappear forever.
The Successful Consulting Series is a set of articles that are being written to both, help decisions on joining the consulting field and also, help existing consultants in their professional development initiatives. Please visit, “Successful Consulting Series” for a full listing of each part in this series. Up to now, many of the articles that have been written for this series could be taken for consulting and utilized for fulltime employment or contract positions.
The Successful Consulting Series is a set of articles that are being written to both, help decisions on joining the consulting field and also, help existing consultants in their professional development initiatives. Please visit, “Successful Consulting Series” for a full listing of each part in this series. Estimating work is both an art and a skill as a consultant. There isn’t one way or set of standards someone can show you to take and use for every client or project you confront.
Recently I was working on a library to consume a REST API without exposing any of the specifics to the rest of the application. Implementing a common interface and set of custom exceptions was easy enough, but exercising the internal logic was going to be tough. While I could use the live REST API to verify the general logic worked, I had limited options when it came to the full range of HTTP responses and communication failures.
This is day ten of the SQL Advent 2012 series of blog posts. Today we are going to look at SQL Server maintenance Just like with a car or a house, you need to do maintenance on databases as well. SQL Server has gotten better over the years, there are less knobs you need to turn out of the box but maintenance is still required. In this post I will be looking at some stuff that you need to be aware of.
The first stage to tuning a query is the coding. Take a look at the query in listing 1 Note: The query above is utilizing three tables pulled from the database AdventureWorks2012. To create these tables, import them without any indexes into another database. Use a SELECT INTO or any other number of import methods to build the tables. SELECT SUM(OrderQty) AS TotalQuantity ,salesman.LastName ,salesman.FirstName ,hdr.ShipDate FROM [Sales].[SalesOrderHeader] hdr JOIN [Sales].
This is day nine of the SQL Advent 2012 series of blog posts. Today we are going to look at something called reinventing the wheel. Just in case your are not familiar with this metaphor or maybe you are not a native English speaker, I will use wikipedia’s description of what reinventing the wheel means. From wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinventing_the_wheel _To reinvent the wheel is to duplicate a basic method that has already previously been created or optimized by others.
Microsoft has made available two pdf files with a nice chart of all the data type conversions. It is pretty much the chart that belongs to the topic CAST and CONVERT (Transact-SQL). Now you have a way of printing a nice looking chart so that you can always reference this. I think this is a great idea, Microsoft should make more of these. The two files are SQL Server Data Type Conversion Chart.
This is day eight of the SQL Advent 2012 series of blog posts. In yesterday’s post SQL Advent 2012 Day 7: Lack of constraints we touched a little upon foreign key constraints but today we are going to take a closer look at foreign keys. The two things that we are going to cover are the fact that you don’t need a primary key in order to define a foreign key relationship, SQL Server by default will not index foreign keys
Introduction A few days ago Demis Bellot (the creator of Servicestack) was talking about Smalltalk on twitter. A little discussion came about involving Alex Ullrich. So my next mission was to learn a thing or two about smalltalk myself. Installation I tried two smalltalk IDE’s. Squeak (which I couldn’t get to work on Win8) and Dolphin X6 community edition. So I stuck with Dolphin. And the installation is next, next, next and finish.