This month’s T-SQL Tuesday is hosted by my friend and brother from another mother, Pinal Dave. My job title is Chief Data Engineer for Enterprise Data & Analytics and Enterprise Data & AI. So, “Has AI Helped you with your SQL Server Job?” In a word, yes. I can hear some of you thinking, … …
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Category:Career
A Procrastination Tale
Late in the evening of 30 Dec, the temperature in casa de Leonard began dropping. The thermostat continued to report a 68°F setting, our setting for cool-ish to downright cold evenings. When I first checked the in-house temperature a little after midnight, the current temperature read 64°F. By morning, the current temperature had dropped to …
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Why I Have Never Liked Personas
First, A Story Years ago I managed an ETL Team at Unisys. When I became manager, we had about 24 team members. The team grew to 40 members. I was initially hired to build an SSIS framework to replace functionality built-in to a competing product. The maintenance cost for the competing product was $1,000,000USD per …
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Searching for Your Next Opportunity?
A friend compiled these thoughts about searching for your Next Opportunity: Reading “How to Survive if You Were Part of the Tech Layoffs” Wired Magazine: How to Survive if You Were Part of the Tech Layoffs | WIRED Online LinkedIn has a ton of posts and resources. This search will pull the latest from LinkedIn. Random …
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On Experience
The following images (from FreeCell) illustrate a couple points about: Net Promoter Score (NPS) Experience Image 1 For the purposes of this post, please imagine the FreeCell win percentage is our Net Promoter Score (NPS). Image 1 displays a perfect NPS. But note something the NPS does not include – the number of games played (and …
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Rarely Say Never
Years ago, I responded privately to my brother and friend, Buck Woody (@BuckWoodyMSFT | LinkedIn) when he shared (excellent) advice about when to shrink a SQL Server database (spoiler alert: rarely). I asked Buck, “If shrinking a SQL Server database is nearly always bad, why not remove the feature from SQL Server?” (paraphrased). Buck’s response …
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How to Stand Out and Gain Followers on Social Media
How’s that for click bait? Does Unsolicited Stuff Bother You? I have to admit, some unsolicited stuff bothers me. It’s one thing if I sign up for a newsletter or follow an account. It’s different if someone visits a contact form on my site and spams me. I have a personal rule to never, ever, …
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AndyStream for 5 Nov 2021
AndyStream for 05 Nov 2021 includes book recommendations.
One Good Question
“How do I…?” I get questions that begin this way. Today, a friend reached out to ask how to search internals of SSIS packages deployed to an instance of the SSIS Catalog. My response was, “I don’t know, but this is how I would learn the answer.” I sent the following query: Select OBJECT_NAME(id) as …
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Q & A: Learning ETL. Where Should I Focus?
A viewer on my YouTube channel asked, “Never been too deep into SSIS, but the new role I’ll be taking on involves ETL, should I be focusing on Azure Data Factory, or do you recommend I keep a foot in each of those worlds?” My response? At this time, it’s prudent to cultivate options in …
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