In a week and a half I will be the newest Senior Developer at a local manufacturing company. In a career path where most developers are seeking software development companies, it’s probably not surprising that I’m one of the ones going the other direction. So Far… My career has been focused on development, but not necessarily on writing code. I’ve had opportunities ranging from leading infrastructure projects to re-learning Unix on the fly during an on-site systems integration, building out virtual environments, performing systems architecture analysis, and generally any of a dozen different, tangential IT functions. I’ve had a tendency to take ownership or lead roles, requiring project management skills, requirements gathering and analysis, and communications skills. Of the over 70 projects on my project log, 50 were projects that I had a lead role in or was individually responsible for.
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.
SQL Saturday in Chicago 2011 has come and gone. From an organizers view the event was very successful. We had our pumps and one problem in the schedule but overall I feel that is pretty good for such a large event that is organized by volunteers. With any event like this, feedback not only tells us what we did right but tells us how to do it better. I’d like to ask all the people that attended and actively read my blog or found this from twitter, facebook, linkedin and such, to leave a comment on how your experience was attending, speaking or volunteering. With that feedback I will get some conversations going with the organizers as a recap and note taking session so next year, SQL Saturday in Chicago 2012 will be that much better.
If you have been writing queries that use ROLLUP, you are probably aware that the aggregated rows return NULL for the column that you are grouping by. What if you already have a NULL value in that column, how can you know which row is the aggregated row? Let’s take a look, first create this table CREATE TABLE TestRollup(Country VARCHAR(20),Col1 INT, col2 INT) INSERT TestRollup VALUES('United States',20,10) INSERT TestRollup VALUES('United States',30,90) INSERT TestRollup VALUES('Denmark',20,10) INSERT TestRollup VALUES('Denmark',44,33) INSERT TestRollup VALUES('Zimbabwe',20,10) INSERT TestRollup VALUES('Zimbabwe',20,10) INSERT TestRollup VALUES('Zimbabwe',20,1000) INSERT TestRollup VALUES('Zimbabwe',2000,10) Now let’s do our simple ROLLUP query
On Friday, I’m heading down to the Windy City for one of my favorite events – SQL Saturday #67, Chicago Edition. This event will be held Saturday, March 26, 2011. The organizers and volunteers have put together another amazing event. There will be over 300 attendees, 40 sessions, lunch from The Meatyballs Mobile, and a chance to catch up with old friends and meet new ones! I will be presenting “Make Your Voice Heard!” at 2:30 PM. This session is going to cover the different ways you can share your SQL Server knowledge, and network – LinkedIn, Twitter, forums and blogging. I’ll give you information on how to start each, tips and tricks, and real-life success stories. There will also be construction paper and crayons!
In [yesterdays blogpost][1] I showed you how to add powershell to your VB.Net application the esay way. Today I will show you a better way to do this. You might have noticed in the previous version that the system was waiting for your statement to finish before it showed anything on the screen, in other words it was doing this in an synchronized way, this is how the powerconsole extension for Visual studio currently works. It would be better to do this in an asyncronized manner, like the nuget console.
I had some fun this week by reading lots and lots of code. Saturday I set out to make myself a gitconsole for Visual studio 2010. I want this because powerconsole is not Async and the nugetconsole has to much nuget bits hanging on to it. Since nuget is opensource I set out to get the powerconsole out of the nuget source. Alas, after spending a few hours with the code I was thinking that nuget is bit to tightly coupled with is console for me to get it out and change it the way I want it. In other words it might be easier to start from scratch. So I did some more reading and found that embedding powershell in your application is pretty easy.
This is a short post, leave me a comment if you have TCP Chimney disabled or enabled. This was suggested to us when we had a problem with mirroring between two servers a while back. I am just wondering if it is disabled or enabled for most of you You can easily check by running this from a command prompt netsh int tcp show global Or if you want to use SSMS, you can use xp_cmdshell
The Spring 2011 edition of 24 Hours of PASS: Celebrating Women in Technology has ended. The past two days have been intense, fun and wonderful. I presented “Reporting Services 201: The Next Level”. I kicked off day two at 7:00 AM CST, with just over 300 attendees. Thank you to everyone that attended! I hope you learned at least one new SSRS trick that you can start using! My slide deck and report samples are uploaded as [24HOP Reporting Services 201.zip][2]. Please feel free to download these for reference and testing. All reports use the AdventureWorks database, and were developed using Reporting Services 2008 R2.
I got in a bit of git trouble today. I had a branch where I had been working on for a while. For some reason when I wanted to merge this branch back into master it did not add the changes I had made in that branch. At this time of distress Google is always at hand to help and sometimes cause more problem. In the time I was trying to resolve my little predicament I learned a few new commands.
Hello from Puerto Rico everyone! I wasn’t planning on doing much while on vacation this week but after seeing some events this morning; I wanted to get one post out there. History It’s been over a year now since Aaron Nelson created the #SQLHELP hash tag. The source of help has been as beneficial as any forum I frequent. The tag provides experts the easy and accessible portal to help where they can as well as providing the same quick portal to get help from those experts. Brent really says about all that you need to figure out how and what SQLHelp is here and here.