The definition, per the Merriam-Webster dictionary, for mentor is: to teach or give advice or guidance to (someone, such as a less experienced person or a child). This definition is, of course, true. However, we can dive a bit deeper into the meaning of mentoring and being a mentor for someone as it relates to the SQL Community. Or more so, expand on the meaning and add more to the definition, as it is written.
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.
It’s very common to come across user-defined modules that are written to execute as the owner. Not to be confused with the EXECUTE AS, the EXECUTE AS Clause will change the account context that is used to validate if the procedure, function etc… can be executed under the credentials. This can be useful when you want to control permissions to a certain extent. However, it can also be problematic when certain ownership changes have been made.
I always wanted to be a radio star. The fame! The glory! The chaos you can cause by running War of the Worlds! There's a great website, RunAsRadio, that frequently interviews technologists about what's hot in IT. I was asked to chat about one of my favorite topics – SQL Server Reporting Services. Never one to turn down a chance to be on my soapbox, I readily agreed. You can listen to the resulting chatter here.
There is this nice person on Youtube that made a huge number of VB.Net Video tutorials. You can find the 200 videos on his channel. There is over 20 hours of videos available there These videos seem to be from the new Boston site that has plenty more free videos for you on many subjects. Thanks to user Langsomt at VBIB for bringing this to my attention.
One of the great things about Diagnostic Manager is the ability to create custom alerts. This is something I believe needs a bit more work, but even in its current state, it is really useful. The example that we’ll walk through is something that would actually make a great built in alert. We will create an alert based on the time of our oldest current database backup. To start off, click on “Administration” in the bottom right hand corner:
This blog is not meant to be a comprehensive explanation of indexes. It is meant to help you determine if there are duplicate indexes within your database. There appears to be some debate regarding what is a duplicate index. This article defines an “Exact Duplicate Index” where there are multiple non-clustered indexes with exactly the same keys and include columns. This query will ignore clustered indexes. It is possible to create a non-clustered index with keys that match a clustered index. Sometimes, this could be considered a duplicate index, and sometimes it should not be considered a duplicate. For example, suppose you have a wide table so that there is only one row per data page. Also suppose you have a query that only needs to use the key columns. It will be faster to use a non-clustered index for the query instead of the clustered index because the non-clustered index would only include the key columns, and you will get more columns per data page. The non-clustered index would require less file I/O, and therefore increased performance.
The SQL Community is like no other. Really! I’ve been part of many technology related communities during my career and no other has felt as well rounded and stable as the SQL Community. This can be seen in social networking tools such as Twitter and how the SQL Community embraces them to enhance the flow and sharing of knowledge and skills. It can be seen from the top SQL Server companies in the world such as SQL Skills, freely exchanging all they have to offer from their highly skilled employees. It can be seen in groups that are created by community leaders and mentors such as SQL People.
I find that when I’m watching recorded presentations or webinars, they feel far more engaging when I can see the person speaking as well as the content. Recently I wanted to put together a 5 minute video with a webcam overlay, but I didn’t want to spend a lot of money doing it. Something like this, in fact: Sample Video Using Tools Below Using a combination of free tools, I was able to record my short video with a webcam overlay, compress it for faster upload, and upload it to to YouTube for sharing.
This post is for the people that have this type of printer, others can read it to see the nice things that are out there and drool over all this awesomeness you will never have. Today I got a new toy to play with , since the old toy broke down . And I got a new Zebra GX430t labelprinter. The problem is that the new printer does not support EPL2 like the older TLP 2844. It supports the newer (I guess) ZPL.
Compression and Segments Columnstore indexes are efficient due to a few primary characteristics they rely on. One of those characteristics is compression. When building a columnstore index, the structure of the table (be it HEAP or clustered B-Tree) is utilized to build the actual columnstore index. After this point, the table itself isn’t really utilized in the terms of normal engine processing as we’ve known it with other indexing. While the columnstore index is being built, data is distributed, if you will, across groups called segments. Within each segment, there will be up to a million rows. Later, we’ll take a look at a segment and what information we can see from it but the overall structure of a segment is based off a grouping of data with a minimum range to maximum range.