Category: Learning

Louis Davidson takes us through the process of asking a good question:

Over the past 25 years, I have answered a lot of programming questions in online forums, from co-workers, and from friends. It has been a while since I had been around forums, but I recently decided it was time to get back to what started me in the SQL community: answering questions. Not only is it complementary to my current job as Simple-Talk editor, it is really a great joy to be able to help other people with their problems. It is also educational to see the kinds of things other people are going through before you also go through them.

Sometimes you know the answer right away, but sometimes the question is a challenge (these are actually my favorite.) At times I have spent hours on a question, trying to figure out a solution that works, and then writing up the answer to post back. Along the way I am learning something new and (assuming I figured out a correct answer,) the question poster usually learns something too. I mean, I have been wrong a few times, at least.

It’s been a decade since I’ve haunted Q&A forums but yeah, answering questions is a good way to learn more. Still, it can be really frustrating for everybody when you get (or ask) a vague question: there’s a lot of opportunity for confusion, non-viable answers, or even people ignoring the question completely because they can’t make sense of it.

Andy Leonard has an offer for free training:

My LinkedIn and social media feeds are filled with contacts and friends sharing their availability for a new career opportunity. While some are more gracious than concerned and others more concerned than gracious, it’s normal to be both concerned and gracious. Well, it was normal for me when it happened to me. If you haven’t been laid off before, I hope you never learn what that feels like.

If you have been laid off already, or if you’ve been notified you are about to be laid off, I encourage you to see this as the beginning on your Next Opportunity.

Click through for the details on this generous offer.

Marc Lelijveld thinks about migrations:

Over the last half year, I have been involved in many large migration projects from another BI tool to Power BI. All with a different setup, from Tableau, Microstrategy and from Analysis Services to Power BI. In this blog I will shine a light on the experiences I gained during these migrations and share some do’s and don’ts. In this blog I start with the why you even migrate in the first place, after which we dive into the where to start and of course also how. A blog that is more focused on the process rather than the technical how-to. At the same time, this blog describes the work I did over the past months and therefore is a small recap of the past half year.

Read on to understand your “why,” at least when it comes to migrations.

Brendan Tierney takes apart a phrase:

In the IT industry we hear the term “legacy” being using, but that does it mean? It can mean a lot of different things and it really depends on the person who is saying it, their context, what they want to portray and their intended meaning. In a lot of cases people seem to use it without knowing the meaning or the impact it can have. This can result in negative impact and not in the way the person intended.

Before looking at some (and there can be lots) possible meanings, lets have a look at what one person said recently.

Read on for a thoughtful reply to some marketing madness.

Grant Fritchey provides some tips:

One thing you see a lot is that people, for whatever reason, will absolutely not simply state what the actual problem is. You’ll get stuff like “What SQL Server internal behavior prevents dynamically naming local variables?” And you’re left scratching your head, why on earth would someone want to dynamically name local variables? Only to find out, after lots of comment & discussion, they thought that you needed to rename variables when changing values.

When you get stuck, take a moment to describe the problem, but aim for the root of the problem, not peripheries. “I want to do X. I’m doing X. It looks like this. The results are this when they should be that. What am I doing wrong?” That’s the “magic” formula.

Grant provides several helpful tips for increasing the likelihood that someone will help you find the right answer.

I want to note two quick things here, though. The first is that, quite often, people don’t even know what they intend to ask. In the cited bit above, this quite often comes from basic confusion cascading into specific “I’m stuck here” questions. This leads to foundational misunderstandings between people and frustrates the question-and-answer process.

The second thing I’d note is, be clear in your writing. The biggest tip I have here is to make sure your sentences and ideas flow. In other words, within a paragraph or section, try to keep thoughts related to the key topic and avoid asides or rambling. The reason for this is that your inner monologue can make sense of a variety of asides, but a reader without access to your thoughts will struggle to follow along. Furthermore, it is common to add bits and pieces to a half-finished post, fleshing out details. Before posting, make sure that it makes reading sense. Quite often, people will write a post and then fill in additional details before submission. A common result of this is that you might add some information intended to clarify a point which you actually introduce later in the post.

Ryan Booz started a thing:

As I sit here on October 7, 2022 watching PostgreSQL friends from all around the globe post contributions to the first ever PGSQL Phriday blogging event, I’m honestly pretty shocked… and very (very, very, very) grateful! While I have lots of ideas and love connecting with people to hear their stories, I wasn’t sure what to expect because, let’s face it, there are so many demands for our time and attention.

The fact that many folks have been supportive of this idea and contributed to this first event truly warms my heart. Thank you each for helping to get this ball rolling!

Click through for the all of the responses. And it’s good to see this getting picked up on the Postgres side.

Michael J. Swart talks about costs:

Think of this another way. The triangle above is a graph of the amount of data you have over time. And if you pay for storage as an operational expense such as when you’re renting storage in the cloud (as opposed to purchasing physical drives). Then the cost of storage is the area of the graph. The monthly bills are ever-increasing, so half of the total cost of storage will be for the most recent 29%.

Put yet another way: If you started creating a large file in the cloud every day since March 2014, then the amount you paid to the cloud provider before the pandemic started is the same amount you paid after the pandemic started (as of August 2022).

I was told there would be no math here.