July 2024’s T-SQL Tuesday is hosted by Dr. SQL himself, Louis Davidson. The topic is “What Advice Do You Wish Current You Could Go Back and Give Past You as You Were Starting Your First Data Platform Job?” I learn from my mistakes and I’ve learned plenty since my first data platform job! Defining “my …
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Category:Career
#TSQL2sday Has AI Helped you with your SQL Server Job?
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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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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