It’s been about a month now since I joined the team at BlueMetal Architects. Since the consulting series has gone so well and the feedback has been really good, I thought this would be the perfect time to extend that series and get a view into a great consulting company. The last month has done nothing but solidify the fact that joining BlueMetal was, to say the least, a great decision. Consulting has its ups and downs. Although this can be said for any position or career, consulting does have moments where it can be brutal. In most situations, the first month really tells a consultant who they are working for (we’re not talking clients, we’re talking the consulting company). In a lot of cases, you’re thrown to a client and really, a disconnection occurs between you and the consulting company. That first month or so makes a big difference in how long or far apart that disconnection goes. In the first month with BlueMetal, there not only hasn’t been a disconnection but a complete opposite relationship. The relationship that I’ve gained with the Chicago BlueMetal team in such a short time has been nothing short of remarkable. Each person has a unique value and a high skill level in their field; SharePoint, SQL Server, Development, and much more. With this team, I can only imagine how far BlueMetal in Chicago will go, and go at a rapid and effective pace.

This is day seven of the SQL Advent 2012 series of blog posts. Today we are going to look at constraints SQL Server supports the following types of constraints: NOT NULL, CHECK, UNIQUE, PRIMARY KEY and FOREIGN KEY. Using constraints is preferred to using DML Triggers, rules, and defaults. The query optimizer will also use constraint definitions to build high-performance query execution plans.

 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. Oh man, this is a tough one! A really really tough one, I struggle with this all the time. I am a mom, have 2 kids ages 7 and 4. There is no doubt about me being a working mom, god bless the ones who stay at home but it’s just not me…I am not disciplined enough. I am completely at peace with working, it’s the how much that I always have a struggle. I am driven in my job and career but I also don’t want to be on my deathbed and folks say “well she kept her inbox really clean”. My kids are young and time already screams by, I don’t want to miss out! And it’s not just an issue for moms and dads, anyone with a career has to find balance with work and the things outside of work that are important to them. Consulting gives me everything and then some technically and professionally, but that can make it harder to find balance.

This is day six of the SQL Advent 2012 series of blog posts. Today we are going to look at standardized naming conventions and other conventions that you should standardize as well. Every company needs to have standards that developers need to follow in order to make maintenance easier down the road. There are several things that you can standardize on, here are just a few: The naming of objects The layout of code including comments

This is day five of the SQL Advent 2012 series of blog posts. Today we are going to look at why you need to be able to write your own DDL statements. Read the following two lines, have you ever answered that or has anyone every answered that when asked this question? Question: How do you add a primary key to a table? Answer: I click on the yellow key icon in SSMS!

Scalability is easy, provided you don’t need it to work. Probably the number one failure of system scaling is when people dive right in and start building. No baselines, limited measurements, no analysis, just a hypothesis and a whole lot of late nights tweaking the system. With extra complexity comes extra costs, from the initial development through more expensive maintenance. Scale poorly and not only do we take on those extra complexity costs, but also the more obvious additional costs of the actual implementation (new servers, more resources, etc).

I had to deploy a user defined function I was given yesterday, when I tried to I got the following error Msg 6850, Level 16, State 1, Procedure fnGetBooks, Line 8 Column name ‘TEXT()’ contains an invalid XML identifier as required by FOR XML; ‘(’(0x0028) is the first character at fault. The function looked a little like this one CREATE FUNCTION fnGetBooks (@AuthorID INT) RETURNS VARCHAR(8000) AS BEGIN DECLARE @BookList VARCHAR(8000) SELECT @BookList =( SELECT BookName + ', ' AS [TEXT()] FROM Books WHERE AuthorID = @AuthorID AND BookName IS NOT NULL ORDER BY BookName FOR XML PATH('') ) RETURN LEFT(@BookList,(LEN(@BookList) -1)) END GO Trying to run that will give you the same error. Do you see the problem? First I determined what 0x0028 was, you can easy do this by running the following query

 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. One of the hardest barriers to get beyond in consulting, and technology, is the task of not overcomplicating a situation and thus causing a stressful situation. In better terms, “Freaking out!” This topic spills into almost every type of job, not just consulting, but fulltime employment in any field. Why this is a part of this series on consulting is, when it comes to consulting, this can have a large impact on being successful. Fulltime employment lends itself, in most cases, to lengthened time and more resources for projects. Consulting adds a layer of difficulty to a project or statement of work that requires time to be managed more effectively and efficiently. The problem with the “freak out factor” is time spent thinking about the stress and leading into overcomplicating the situation.

This is day four of the SQL Advent 2012 series of blog posts. Today we are going to look at triggers. Triggers are a great way to keep your database in a consistent state. There are two types of triggers, DML triggers and DLL triggers. DML triggers respond to Data Manipulation Statements (Insert, Delete, Update) DDL triggers respond to Data Definition Language events. Some things that DML triggers are used for:

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. As a consultant working independently or for a consulting company, expenses can be one of the hardest and most easily forgotten aspects to managing yourself. There are a few techniques and habits you can take on to help this aspect to consulting that will make expenses something as easy as entering your hours billed. In saying that, I’m imagining all the consultants thinking, “Urgh! I forgot to track and enter my hours this week.”