The blog of Andy M. Mallon
Notes on data, technology, and the humans behind the work.
If this dog-umentation is right, can you spot all the problems in the generated arf-ifact? For years, I’ve advocated for keeping developer documentation in the same code repository as the code it describes. In the age of AI, that practice has become even more …
Continue readingWe used to call Callie "C". There’s a particular kind of writing that has become increasingly easy to produce: technically plausible, grammatically correct, reasonably well organized, and almost completely exhausting to read. You know the stuff–it has a lot …
Continue readingSQL Agent’s schema is older than me. It handles dates, times, and durations like it’s 1980 by using integers instead of date/time data types. My buddy Aaron Bertrand talks more about Dating Responsibly so that you can have a good datetime with your own …
Continue readingStatistics auto-updates are generally a good thing–auto-update of statistics is the default behavior in SQL Server. Having the freshest information about the data “shape” helps to inform the best selection of an execution plan for queries. Except for when it …
Continue readingFor this month's T-SQL Tuesday, Brent Ozar (blog|Instagram) asks us to describe the most recent ticket we closed. “We had a pretty significant wait spike…” The literal last ticket I closed was “please run this script in production…”, and I don’t think it …
Continue readingElphie wearing her "I bark at bigots" pawkerchief I've seen more and more events & communities adopt Codes of Conduct. Even local events, local user groups, and smaller online communities are adopting Codes of Conduct. That's GREAT! ...but it's just a great …
Continue readingI recently saw a question on DBA Stack Exchange (it has since been deleted by the author), who had a “special process” that ran regularly, and as part of that process, they disabled the trigger, did some stuff, and re-enabled it. During that process, the step …
Continue readingElphaba the pup is growing up! I'm not going to beat around the bush. I hate the `SERVERPROPERTY()` and `DATABASEPROPERTYEX()` system functions. Loathing The thing I hate the most about these two functions is that you need to know the right magic spells to …
Continue readingBack in my day, we stored SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) packages in msdb, or the file system. Well, I’m neither dead nor retired, so that’s not an accurate statement–today is still “my time.” But when I was learning about SQL Server, those were the …
Continue readingFor this month's T-SQL Tuesday, John McCormack (blog|twitter) asks us: “What are your go-to short, handy scripts”? I've got so many handy dandy scripts, it was hard to choose. Where to start? I have so many go-to scripts that are short, amazing, and I use all …
Continue readingThis is our puppy Elphaba. She's from Oz...No, the other Oz. She's popular. There was a recent post on Database Administrators, where there was some confusion over Daylight Saving Time(DST) in Australian timezones. Let’s be honest though–timezones are …
Continue readingCaterpillars transform into beautiful butterflies to realize their full self, much in the same way CONVERT() changes binary into beautiful hexadecimal strings. Since I started at Stack Overflow, I’ve had the chance to see some of the interesting challenges …
Continue readingIn my prior post, I talked about how all signs pointed to it being Closing Time for PASS. Since then, PASS has announced the organization will “cease its operations and pursue dissolution.” TL;DR; The short version is that on 15 January, 2021, PASS will shut …
Continue readingOpen letter from Mindy Curnutt to the PASS Membership. (zoom) This year, I’ve written a couple of critical posts targeted at PASS. If you follow me on Twitter, you know I’ve been critical there, too. Last week, the PASS Board of Directors had their December …
Continue readingIn yesterday’s post, I showed how to configure an availability group (AG) to use the RegisterAllProvidersIP=0 when you can’t get clients to connect using the MultiSubnetFailover=true connection string attribute. I mentioned that you have to make some …
Continue readingAs a DBA, we have the opportunity & responsibility to build highly available database platforms for use by applications & users. Even if you are a DBA at a small company supporting databases for only internal applications, we are usually still responsible for …
Continue readingPhoto via unsplash Microsoft is going to be running a virtual hackathon, running from October 12 through November 20. The theme of the hack will be to use Microsoft Azure to address some social justice issue. I’m thrilled to be joining the judging panel for …
Continue readingEarlier this week, I published a post about a proposed Tech Community Equality Index, and used it to grade the largest organization in the data community, PASS. One of the areas where I was critical of PASS is that their Anti-Harassment Policy (AHP) is not …
Continue readingOver the last weeks & months, I’ve had an increasing number of conversations with folks on the topics of diversity, inclusion, equality, and justice. These discussions we have with coworkers, members of the data community, family and friends are all valuable, …
Continue readingForget what you learned in school-- "they" is singular Lots of folks want to be an ally to the LGBTQ community, but don’t know where to start. One great way to be an ally is relatively low-friction. List your pronouns. Everywhere. Put your pronouns in your …
Continue readingThis month’s T-SQL Tuesday is hosted by Kenneth Fisher (blog|twitter). Kenneth asked us to talk about any non-SQL tips and tricks we have. I’m going to take the moment to give some tips on how (and why) you can help fight bigotry, racism, and racial injustice.
Continue readingMarsha P Johnson, LGBTQ rights activist & Stonewall instigator. Last year was the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall riots, which mark the start of the modern LGBTQ rights movement in the US. In the subsequent half century, the queer community has made …
Continue readingThis is Callie. She has nothing to do with DMVs, but isn't she cute?! SQL Server 2005 introduced Dynamic Management Views(DMVs). Technically, there are both views & functions–DMVs & DMFs, but colloquially they’re often simply referred to as just “DMVs”. DMVs …
Continue readingWe’ve all been there. You’ve got a query where the JOIN or WHERE predicate is not SARGable. You’ve read about how this can be a problem, and how bad it is for performance. Alas, you cannot change the query. Sometimes this reason is political, sometimes it’s …
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