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DataDictionarySelect

The Voice of the DBA

Valentines Day for Data Professionals

It's Valentine's Day today, and if you've forgotten, you still have time to do a little shopping or show your partner that you value them. While this isn't a public holiday in any country that I know of, many people do want to celebrate with someone special to them. In fact, if you forget about this day, chances are the next few might not be so pleasant.

For many of us, we'll spend nearly as much time at work each week as we might spend with our families. Between a few extra hours here and there at work, commuting, and sleep, it may often feel like we spend more time at work. Hopefully that's not the case, and if it is, you should re-evaluate your current position.

Most of us do have a relationship with our career. We've chosen it for some reason and are often locked into doing certain work in the short term. With today being a relationship holiday, I wanted to ask you to think about if you really love your career?

I'm not speaking about your current job and employer. You might enjoy being a developer, DBA, or other data professional while not being enamored with the position and place you work now. I'm asking for the long term, are you happy with your career choice and looking to continue moving on this path.

If you are, good for you, and I hope you find a great position that suits your life. If not, it doesn't matter what you've done in the past. You can start moving forward in another direction today.

I love my job, and I've enjoyed the last 25 years of working with SQL Server. I don't know if I want to do another 25, but I certainly am still in love with my choice today.

Steve Jones from SQLServerCentral.com

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

The Voice of the DBA Podcast

Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 2.5MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and Libsyn.

The Voice of the DBA podcast features music by Everyday Jones. No relation, but I stumbled on to them and really like the music.

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Featured Contents

Calculating DTU's for Azure SQL Database

Ganapathi varma Chekuri from SQLServerCentral.com

This calculator will help you determine the number of DTUs for your existing SQL Server database(s) as well as a recommendation of the minimum performance level and service tier that you need before you migrate to Azure SQL Database. More »

Free eBook: SQL Server Internals: In-Memory OLTP

Press Release from Redgate

In this free eBook, Kalen Delaney explains how Microsoft's 2016 In-memory OLTP engine works. In her book, learn how to use lock- and latch-free data structures to allow non-blocking data processing, and find out how to migrate existing tables to Hekaton. More »

SQL Server Machine Learning Services – Part 4: Finding Data Anomalies with Python

Additional Articles from SimpleTalk

Python is widely used to analyze data. One such use is to find anomalies or outliers. In this article, Robert Sheldon demonstrates how to create a support vector machine (SVM) to score test data so that outliers can be viewed on a scatter plot. More »

From the SQLServerCentral Blogs - Wait Statistics on a Query

Grant Fritchey from SQLServerCentral Blogs

Wait statistics are a vital part of understanding what is causing your system to run slowly. Capturing them can be... More »

From the SQLServerCentral Blogs - Waiting Tasks Reveal Pain Points

MarlonRibunal from SQLServerCentral Blogs

Waiting tasks quickly shows you where to look for the bottlenecks. This is only one of the many times that I... More »

Question of the Day

Today's Question (by Steve Jones):

I have two data frames that I want to compare. The first is passing.2017, and contains this data:

 rank player.name year2017 yards2017 1 1 Tom Brady 2017 4577 2 2 Philip Rivers 2017 4515 3 3 Matthew Stafford 2017 4446 4 4 Drew Brees 2017 4334 5 5 Ben Roethlisberger 2017 4251

The second is passing.2016, with this data:

 rank player.name year yards2016 1 1 Drew Brees 2016 5208 2 2 Matt Ryan 2016 4944 3 3 Kirk Cousins 2016 4917 4 4 Aaron Rodgers 2016 4428 5 5 Philip Rivers 2016 4386

If I want to combine these so that my final data set has 5 rows and compares the top ranked passers, which function should I use?

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Yesterday's Question of the Day

Yesterday's Question (by Steve Jones):

On SQL Server 2016, what is the data type of a parameter for SET CONTEXT_INFO?

Answer: binary data

Explanation:

SET CONTEXT_INFO needs varbinary(128) data passed in. Other data types need to be implicitly CASTed or CONVERTed to this type. The implicit conversions occur with numeric types

Ref: SET CONTEXT_INFO - click here

CAST and CONVERT - click here

» Discuss this question and answer on the forums

Featured Script

DataDictionarySelect

Patrick Slesicki from SQLServerCentral.com

Select the appropriate database and run.

This query creates a data dictionary for all joinable objects in the databases, i.e. tables, views, and table valued functions.

Let me know what you think.

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