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Category: Learning

SQL Server Book Recommendations

Published 2025-04-10 by Kevin Feasel

Erik Darling has a list:

They are organized by author, and in no particular order of importance, quality, or anything other than how they appear on my bookshelf.

I am saddened that the $20 I sent Erik did not make it in time for my glorious book on PolyBase in SQL Server 2019 to make it on his recommendations list.

Jokes aside, you could do a lot worse than starting off with the list Erik has. There are quite a few books I’d add to that list, but the idea is not to scare people away by recommending a stack of books as tall as they are.

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Finding Oracle Blogs

Published 2025-04-04 by Kevin Feasel

Brendan Tierney theoretically makes my life easier:

A regular question I get asked is, “is there a list of Oracle-related Blogs?” and “what people/blogs should I follow to learn more about Oracle Database?” This typically gets asked by people in the early stages of their careers and even by those who have been around for a while.

You could ask these questions to twenty different (experienced) people, and you’d get largely the same answers with some variations. These variations would be down to their preferences on how certain people cover certain topics. This comes down to experience of following lots of people and learning over time.

Click through for a list of top Oracle blogs. I should probably check out some of them, though I don’t tend to do much with Oracle here. But if you do, there’s a starting point with 100 separate blogs to check out.

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T-SQL Tuesday 184 Round-Up

Published 2025-03-20 by Kevin Feasel

Deborah Melkin casts a wide net:

There were a lot of themes that I noticed throughout everyone’s posts. First were the number of people who mentioned that mentoring doesn’t have to be formal or even a 1:1 relationship. Mentoring isn’t just for adults and careers, but for the next generation too. Mentoring has helped their careers or become part of a core tenant in their company and how they run their business. It’s a place to grow our community, and not just for those who look like us. We all talked about how we have grown from mentoring, not just as mentees but as mentors.

Click through for a dozen-and-a-half responses to the T-SQL Tuesday call.

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Learn from Developer Edition rather than Express Edition

Published 2024-11-15 by Kevin Feasel

Vlad Drumea learns the right way:

It’s free for non-production use

Just like SQL Server Express Edition, Developer Edition is free, but, unlike Express, it’s only free for non-production purposes (developing, testing, demoing, learning).

If you want to learn more about this, Bob Ward has a blog post that covers this in-depth and answers some questions that people tend to have about Developer Edition.

Back in the day, Developer Edition used to cost money—something like $50, so not much, but just enough to make people prefer Express Edition. Those days are long gone, however.

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Generative AI Answers: Do Not Trust, Do Verify

Published 2024-11-01 by Kevin Feasel

Erik Darling speaks wisdom:

Here’s what I’ve used it for with some success:

  • Creating images for Beer Gut Magazine
  • Summarizing long documents
  • Writing boilerplate stuff that I’m bad at (sales and marketing drivel, abstracts, lists of topics)

But every time I ask it to do that stuff, I really have to pay attention to what it gives me back. It’s often a reasonable starting place, but sometimes it really goes off the rails.

That’s true of technical stuff, too. Here’s where I’ve had a really bad time, and if there’s anything you know deeply and intimately, you’ll find similar problems too.

Click through for Erik’s experience. That’s pretty close to my own, and is a big part of why I refer to generative AI models as being akin to drunken interns: sure, give them assignments, but you’d better double-check every part of it.

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Tips for Developing Good Tutorials

Published 2024-10-21 by Kevin Feasel

Adron Hall shares some advice on writing a tutorial (or any kind of technical documentation):

Here’s the deal, tutorial writers: lay out ALL the prerequisites clearly at the beginning. And I mean ALL of them. Don’t assume I have jq installed for your GraphQL tutorial. Don’t assume I’m running the latest version of Python (and for the love of code, specify WHICH Python – 2.x or 3.x?).

And here’s a novel idea: how about actually telling me where to find and install these prerequisites? Give me links, give me version numbers, give me command line instructions. Assume I’m starting from scratch on a fresh machine. Because guess what? Sometimes I am!

I think that the set of tips Adron provides is aspirationally solid, meaning that there may be some things you can’t actually do but you should certainly try to do all of them. And I’m certainly not perfect at this.

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The Most Important Tool for a Data Detective

Published 2024-10-09 by Kevin Feasel

Andy Yun wants you to use your earholes:

The All Powerful…

… Question. That is what I now believe is the most important tool for a Data Detective.

Asking Questions Effectively

This nuance involves HOW you ask a question. Some of this involves knowing your audience. Is this the right place or the right time? Sometimes there comes a point where asking questions is just counter-productive because your audience has no interest in answering. And it also means you need to make sure you’re asking the correct audience in the first place.

Asking questions is difficult, so instead, I just strawman my way to success.

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Tips for Navigating the Support Ticket Process

Published 2024-09-24 by Kevin Feasel

Kendra Little shares several tips:

Asking Microsoft for support for SQL Server or Azure SQL is a lousy experience these days. This is true whether you are using a cheaper service tier or the more expensive support tier formerly known as “Premiere Support.” Either way, I’ve found the same issues: as the person requesting support, I must know a whole lot about the root cause of my problem and how to solve it, or my request will be dismissed with misinformation. I need to have data and metrics that back up my claims in order to get the ticket escalated to someone who can help, and I will need to provide those receipts three or four times. Once something is escalated to the Product Group, I may get a helpful response, but it will generally take a while. If I’m not engaged directly with the Product Group and the answer is being relayed through a lower support tier, it often won’t make much sense.

These issues don’t happen due to bad work ethics or personal failings of support workers. These are good humans, who are trying their best! The problem is worse, because it’s systemic.

Kendra’s specific advice is around Microsoft and the Azure SQL family of products (SQL Server, Azure SQL DB, Azure SQL Managed Instance) but the advice is sound for much more than that. This advice will help you out when dealing with the support organization for pretty much any large company.

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