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Category: T-SQL Tuesday

Consistency as the Best Coding Rule

Published 2022-06-14 by Kevin Feasel

Kevin Chant values consistency:

Over the years I have worked a lot with automating T-SQL updates across multiple databases. During that time, it has become very clear that both consistency and comments are essential to make the process smooth.

Naming conventions of objects created using T-SQL should be consistent. Along with comments in your code for colleagues or anybody else who picks up your code.

Especially if you are working in a team who want to work in a DevOps related way.

I value consistency a lot but I’ve found I’m too inconsistent to be consistent.

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T-SQL Tuesday 150 Round-Up

Published 2022-05-25 by Kevin Feasel

Kenneth Fisher finishes a roundup:

This months subject for T-SQL Tuesday was Your first technical job. I have to say I really really enjoyed reading everyone’s stories and it in a lot of ways made me feel closer to all of you. Thanks for participating!

And of course, if I forgot someone please let me know so I can get them added!

Click through to see everybody’s entries.

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Using Transactions in SQL Server

Published 2022-04-13 by Kevin Feasel

Kevin Chant has good advice:

When doing inserts, updates or delete statements using T-SQL always, and I mean always, run them inside a transaction.

You can do this in different ways in SQL Server. One of the most popular ways is to start an explicit transaction by using the begin transaction command. From there you can either commit the transaction if it is good or issue a rollback command to undo the transaction.

Read on for the why. This is excellent advice.

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Modifying Multiple Lines of Text at Once in SSMS

Published 2022-04-13 by Kevin Feasel

Chad Callihan has some advice:

A quick T-SQL/SSMS trick that I know and love is the ability to add text to multiple lines at a time. I tend use macros in Notepad++ to accomplish these types of repetitive actions but this type of work can be completed in SSMS.

Annoyingly, this doesn’t work quite the same way in VS Code or Azure Data Studio. Alt + Down moves a line down one, Alt + Shift + Down copies the current line. To replicate this behavior in VS Code / Azure Data Studio, hold down Alt + Shift and use the mouse to select the lines you want.

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Who You Gonna Call? Upgrade Edition

Published 2022-02-10 by Kevin Feasel

Kenneth Fisher pulls out the company directory:

This month the topic we are blogging about is Upgrade Strategies. Or, how do we look at SQL Server upgrades. In my case I want to talk about the absolute hardest part of any upgrade at my company.

I should point out that I work for a large company with a lot of moving parts. Over the course of my tenure here I’ve helped to support hundreds to thousands of SQL Server instances. And at least for us, the technical part of an upgrade isn’t too bad. Where we almost always run into problems is Who do we contact?

Read on for Kenneth’s thoughts on the topic.

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Thoughts on Upgrades

Published 2022-02-09 by Kevin Feasel

T-SQL Tuesday this month is all about upgrades, so here are a few more thoughts on the topic. Let’s start with Reitse Eskens:

Things change when you’re working with a lot of data or when you’re trying to use SQL Server to the max. At some point you’ll see new features that will support your workload or add security for your data. Here are the steps I’d take to evaluate new versions.

Todd Kleinhans tells a horror story with a happy ending:

I had just been laid off for the first time in my life from a dot com. I was a classic ASP web developer, a junior development DBA, and I knew Access and FileMaker Pro. Interviewed and got hired on as a contractor to help with Access and ASP.

Before me, a local consulting company was retained to help them with the migration from Access to SQL Server. It was a disaster.

Rob Farley thinks about ways to make the upgrade process smoother:

I don’t envy application vendors who don’t have a strong DevOps story. They need to get it in place so that they can scale, but it doesn’t happen overnight. The road to good deployment practice is long and is threatened by all kinds of things. Code coverage is rarely complete, and problems seem to find those places that don’t have good testing in place yet (typically because problems are avoided in the areas that do have good testing). All this is so much easier when a project is starting from scratch, and not the culmination of a decade or more of development needing to be compatible with the last four versions of SQL Server and Windows.

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Slow-Rolling Patches

Published 2022-02-09 by Kevin Feasel

Alex Stuart tends to end up on the late adopter side of things:

My experience of SQL upgrades is that they tend to be largely dictated by neccessity, either of the ‘the Security team is getting really twitchy about these old servers’ or ‘crap, it’s license renewal time and the vendor doesn’t support x’ variety. I’ve never performed one that wasn’t under some sort of pressure. How do we get here?

Click through for the downsides of really slow adoption. The biggest problem is that you’re trading current convenience for future pain when slow-playing adoption, as Alex mentions.

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Upgrade Strategies

Published 2022-02-08 by Kevin Feasel

Deepthi Goguri discusses upgrading:

When I started my first job as a DBA seven years ago, my project was to migrate several SQL Servers and all the servers were in SQL Server 2000. In my first SQL class at my school, I started my learning with SQL Server 2012. It was a shock to me to work on SQL 2000 databases at the time (as I am not familiar with the SQL Server 2000 yet), especially as it was my first job as a DBA.

My first project was to migrate approximately two hundred and fifty SQL 2000 SQL Servers to SQL Server 2012/2016. It took us a couple of years to successfully migrate all these Servers.

Deepthi mentions fear as a demotivating factor. In fairness, fear is a valid response to upgrades for two separate reasons: first, because the changes they release might break your existing code (something very common in the data science world); and second, because new code has new bugs that you haven’t discovered or worked around yet.

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