The Unbearable Lightness of Data
Have you ever tried explaining your job to family or friends and seen their eyes glaze over? Will Thrash explains it better than we did. In the first 15 minutes or so of this video he talks about how he first got interested in data at a young age, and why it still holds his interest to this day. You can tell he gets why we do what we do, and why we all love it.
In the latter half he gives a good overview of different philosophies and technologies in the market today, including Kimball design, Hadoop, and more.
This blog is beautiful in its simplicity. Each post is simply a useful query for Netezza, like a query for user sessions, a query for primary keys, a query for database objects size, etc.
Seeding SQL RAND Method With NEWID for Per-Row Random Values
At some point you may have attempted to use the random function in a query expecting to get a different random number on each row, and discovered that it doesn’t exactly work that way. This post shows the ingenious technique of seeding the random function with the newid() function, creating a new random number for every row. I’ve used this trick to create sample data for several articles on this site!
Sending a DataTable to a Stored Procedure
A very useful trick that many don’t know about; you can send a whole data table to a stored procedure. The trick is to create a user-defined table type. This article shows how to wire it all up.
A great article on the danger of the infamous NOLOCK hint. Jason Strate makes a compelling point at the end that I’m personally familiar with: reports that give an incorrect result, but then a correct result when the user re-runs them. I don’t know how much time I’ve wasted looking for bugs in query logic when NOLOCK was the culprit all along.
