Needed to alter a particular stored procedure over a few thousand databases.  Here is an example script that uses a cursor and dynamic sql to do this.  Key point here is to have the USE statement switch the database prior to issuing the CREATE OR ALTER command so that each

Got some quirky unexpected behavior when loading data from text files and SQL statements when working with extended ASCII characters and Unicode. These files in particular are UTF8 encoded as is standard when doing text editing and contain strings with contents like so æ2Ç9£╖♫↕◄‼↨∟. File editing example Visual Studio CodeExampleText

In the commit early and often strategy means checking in and commit code all the time like saving a file and sometimes when you do this you accidentally check in something that you shouldn't have and even push it up to the remote server(s) Do this to fix itCheck

User defined functions suffer from inability to be query plan optimized, but this is a nice function I wrote to find ASCII control characters CREATE FUNCTION [dbo].[ContainsControlCharacters] ( @textToCheck NVARCHAR(MAX) ) RETURNS BIT AS BEGIN DECLARE @invalidCharCount INT; -- Sadness that it came to this -- Splits the input text

Sometimes due to circumstances beyond your control you get garbage in your database.  Optimally you would filter this data out from getting to and residing in your data storage, but decisions are made and things are built to allow for partial mistaken data rather than complete perfect data.  Today I

Was asked an interview whiteboarding question that was using a data graph and to solve two problems.  I don't like whiteboarding sessions as I don't think they have a good application to what software in practice is and how to solve them.  They sit as isolated puzzles that can be

What is a Temporal Table?A system versioned user table that maintains the entire history of data changesIntroduced SQL:2011, proposed 1992Active data table is mirrored by historical mirror table controlled by databaseTemporal Table DetailsTwo timestamps columns are required to establish record validity for a periodTracking is at record levelDesigned

Most companies have too many rules. They're designed to keep people in line and drive them to produce more. The assumption is that without rules, people would be unmotivated, directionless, and unproductive.  This is insulting, patronizing, and an adversarial attitude to have. Trust, freedom, and autonomy are three traits that

As I was trying to do some database schema cleanup, I needed to scan all databases on a particular server and see if there are any records in the table.  If there were no records this user table is unused and can not be dropped at this point. This approach

Was asked to question as part of an application and I thought it would be good to publicly share and document them for future reference. What is one strong opinion you have about software development that is also strongly held, and why do you hold this opinion?NULL is bad,

Had to do some sequential merging of records in sql data and this is one of the few occasions when a cursor is useful and it had been quite awhile since I had written a cursor and refreshed my memory with this. Need to merge records from a table that

Remember: Make a backup every time before upgrading Was writing a blog post and saw that a critical security feature was released for ghost this blog engine and found that my collation again is blowing up the migrations. Ghost blog people fix this shit by establishing a script to do

Did a copy/paste and accidentally stumbled onto the option enhancer that I had not remembered using before Example: Command+CStart with a simple command+c operation copy command I do all the time, but now in the paste target press Command+Option+V and you get in my case

Came across a data situation where a previous decision to allow 1-N matching for a parent->child table relationship was now unecessary and had led to confusion on data matching because the availability to add multiple records meant duplication was not apparent to the user.   Data Axiom: Respect the

Tried to open a link in the command line, but was unable to because terminal did not recognize chrome as a registered binary to handle and open urls. ExperimentationTried to do this: chrome http://google.com Error was: zsh: command not found: chrome Ok, so I will fall back to

Upgrading to the latest version of 3.X was no problem, but then moving from 3.X to 4 everything blew up because of database schema changes with messages like this A GhostError occurred. Message: Ghost was able to start, but errored during boot with: alter table `members_status_events`

Open Source, it forms the basis of most personal and commercial software with no sign of a decrease in adoption or change in it's practical use.  At <Company> there is no project or solution that I have heard of or examined that does not use or build from

Previously a design choice was made to store raw JSON responses in a table as  VARCHAR(MAX) field.  As the person coming in afterwards to understand and debug the problem this was a pain to read and work with.  First I don't know the schema and second it sits in

Sometimes you want to test a query being unable to access a table that is part of a query (suppose you are using an ORM like Entity Framework <- which sucks ) and a reasonably quick way I have found to make the table appear busy or unavailable is to

Preface: Covid19 is a unique situation that gives opportunity to embrace successful distributed work.  With over eight plus months of resounding success to distributed work for the company with expectations meant and exceeding even the optimistic forecasts, I would like to propose a further open program to be created and

Use git log with the arguments ofafter Takes iso date parameter for example: 2020-01-01author Takes string pattern most likely the email connected to the committer author like me@memememe.comThen pretty print the commits to format date, name, and commit message textpretty Specify a format according to pattern in this

A bug was reported where matching condition in the table join was produce erroneous matches and in this case this cause an invalid match which then caused the system to report records were not completed or available. Here is an example setup and results DECLARE @name1 NVARCHAR(200) = 'ABCDE FGHIJ'

Collected merge statement alternatives as their use can consolidate the insert/update sql code necessary but come with known risks The Case of the Blocking Merge Statement (LCK_M_RS_U locks) Use Caution with SQL Server’s MERGE StatementSQL Server 2008 introduced the MERGE statement, which promised to be

As Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 is a separated Virtual Machine on the host Windows Operating System instead of a process it is no longer able to use the same X Windows forwarding over 127.0.0.1 that I was previously available. Setup X-Windows forwardingAdd the following to your

Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 which is now a fully backed kernel linked through underlying virtual machine tied into the hypervisor of the machine is a full linux kernel and environment, but it still sits inside of the Windows host which can make some debugging issues a little off. First