Strate SQL » Off Topic

Happy Pi Day

jstrate — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 12:00:00 +0000

Sometimes you have to be this geeky. Here’s a Pi Pie for Pi Day…

If you aren’t hungry… here’s another slice of Pi

3.141592653589793238462643383279502884197169399375105820974944592307816406286208998628034825342117067982148086513282306647093844609550582231725359408128481117450284102701938521105559644622948954930381964428810975665933446128475648233786783165271201909145648566923460348610454326648213393607260249141273724587006606315588174881520920962829254091715364367892590360011330530548820466521384146951941511609433057270365759591953092186117381932611793105118548074462379962749567351885752724891227938183011949129833673362440656643086021394946395224737190702179860943702770539217176293176752384674818467669405132000568127145263560827785771342757789609173637178721468440901224953430146549585371050792279689258923542019956112129021960864034418159813629774771309960518707211349999998372978049951059731732816096318595024459455346908302642522308253344685035261931188171010003137838752886587533208381420617177669147303598253490428755468731159562863882353787593751957781857780532171226806613001927876611195909216420198938095257201065485863278865936153381827968230301952035301852968995773622599413891249721775283479131515574857242454150695950829533116861727855889075098381754637464939319255060400927701671139009848824012858361603563707660104710181942955596198946767837449448255379774726847104047534646208046684259069491293313677028989152104752162056966024058038150193511253382430035587640247496473263914199272604269922796782354781636009341721641219924586315030286182974555706749838505494588586926995690927210797509302955321165344987202755960236480665499119881834797753566369807426542527862551818417574672890977772793800081647060016145249192173217214772350141441973568548161361157352552133475741849468438523323907394143334547762416862518983569485562099219222184272550254256887671790494601653466804988627232791786085784383827967976681454100953883786360950680064225125205117392

Also, don’t forget about Daylight Savings if you are one of the those afflicted by this change in the time zone.

My Three Events

jstrate — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 00:07:56 +0000

A while back, I noticed that Paul Randal (on twitter as @paulrandal) had started a new blog meme on three events that brought their life to where it is today. I’ve skipped a lot the past year’s memes due to time constraints but thought I’d chime in on this one and have a go at it.

First I Was A DJ

Back when I was an extremely shy version of current myself, I had gone to a wedding. The DJ sucked. The musical choices were poor. Songs were cut off in the middle of play for something new. Not a fade to something better, but an abrupt stop and reversal of the entire tone of the moment. And the equipment had no sound quality what-so-ever. In fact, the DJ sucked so bad that I was convinced I could have done a better job.

As I was "armchair quarterbacking" the DJ the following week, I said that I should do that. If she could, then I definitely could. And the I was approached by a co-worker who asked if I started a company if I would DJ her wedding. After thinking about it a bit, I decided to take her up on the offer.

The biggest problem after getting her money and contract was a general lack of any of the required infrastructure. I worked out a deal with my uncle to purchase the necessary speakers, mixers, and lights. And then I started shopping for CDs. Within a couple months, I was approaching nearly 1,000 CDs and had a new problem.

How do I make music lists without a lot of work? How should I catalog the music? How will I find the next song to play when the current song is playing?

That led me to take a look at the programs on my computer and I found one called… Access 2.0. I wasn’t really sure what it was, but it seemed that it could do what I needed. I sat down and after hundreds of hours of tinkering over the years, I built a fairly robust database that I could use to manage and organize music for my business.

And I was officially a database hack. ~~I will qualify, I was a wedding DJ. I did not have two turntables. But I did have a microphone.~~

Then I Sucked At Credit Analysis

When I was a database hack, I hadn’t actually believed anyone could make money or have a career with computer-machines. So instead, I pretended to go to college and worked as a server. Somewhere in there I decided to pick up a temp job and started at a bank working on entering credit card applications. Oh yeah! Data entry.

I rocked at the data entry and was soon moved off of that to reviewing individual credit cards. And then off to corporate credit using the internet to try and research the background and news happening with the bank’s customers. One of the greatest lessons I learned at this point was that almost everything was on the internet, it was just a matter of submitting the right query.

Doing good at your job can have it’s curses. I was soon asked to move to another group to do credit analysis within the corporate credit department. I didn’t have a background in finances but I was young and willing to do the work in front of me. Long and the short of it, I sucked at credit analysis. I was so clueless as to what I was doing and trying to fake it while I tried to learn what I needed to know. I was in over my head and ready to quit.

One of my old managers recognized this and remembered when I was stellar and offered to bring me over to her group rather than my current manager letting me go. My desire to quit had been a little bit slower than the current managers desire to fire me. Fortunately, though, before either happened I was moved to a merchant fraud risk group.

The nice thing about this group is that I eventually got a chance to highlight my database hack skills. They had an Access database that they used for uncovering merchant fraud. More specifically, they had an Access database that 100% mimicked a mainframe application and was as user friendly. They even managed to make it uglier than its predecessor.
One thing led to another and when I left this department, I was a SQL Server developer. The Access database now had a SQL Server backend. And I was heading to a data warehousing group to write DTS packages.

I Got Divorced

Throughout my time at the bank, I had a number of life changing events that occurred. Some of the highlights were getting married and having four children. And some of the lows were my daughter and my best friend from my college years passing away. I worked a lot and didn’t pay attention to my spouse or children nearly as much as I should have. And really wasn’t having a good time with life. All of this culminated in getting divorced.

For many divorce is a low point, and I’ll admit to having some bad days after it started. But as a whole it was one of the best decisions of my life. And really lead to a lot of success, happiness, and a chance to be a better father to my children.

It gave me an opportunity to re-think my life and career. This was when I decided that I should control my career and not just let it happen to me, which is when I started blogging and started a new job at Digineer as a consultant. I also decided to stop putting off things that I wanted to do and live my life in a way that I was satisfied with every day and what I did with it.

Since then I’ve had a lot of fun with my kids. Enjoyed life and where it is going. And I can once again count my ex-wife as a very good friend. Life is good.

No related posts.

The Sixth Sense

jstrate — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 22:15:00 +0000

This is an amazing technology concept. It is a little ugly at the moment, but I bet that once it hits the design phase it will look pretty cool. Maybe they’ll be able to shrink it into a pair of sunglasses.

No related posts.

Pie Day

jstrate — Sat, 14 Mar 2009 18:59:00 +0000

Happy Pi Day!

No related posts.

Never Tell Them The Odds… (OT)

jstrate — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 20:00:00 +0000

I’ve been waiting a long time for the movie Fanboys to hit theaters and it has finally come. The first time I saw a preview for this movie was more than three years ago. Throughout all of the delays, I’ve been waiting patiently to see it.

Starwars blog posted an announcement today that three theaters in Minnesota will be showing the movie this weekend. I know what I am doing on Sunday night.

No related posts.

My First Computer and Favorite Old Games (OT)

jstrate — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 15:25:00 +0000

Continuing this thread, I was tagged by Rob Boek to post about my first computer and and favorite games.
The first computer that I had access to was a Commodore 64 that my dad purchased when I was probably about 10 years old. That thing was awesome! We had it all — the monitor, keyboard, floppy drive, tape drive, and a modem.
I remember playing with it quite a bit. I’d make artwork, small little programs, and, of course, play games on it.

The only games I can really remember playing on it was Jumpman and Jumpman Jr. But I would play that game for hours and hours. And, of course, somehow through the modem I did manage to track down some cheats on it as well.
Knowing that there is a Jumpman port available is a little tempting to download, but I’m afraid that it would only server to crush my fond childhood memories.

The second computer that my family owned was an IBM PS/2. And, ooh, at the time it was state of the art. I didn’t play very many graphical games on it. I tried to get a copy of Leisure Suit Larry, but kept running into problems getting it. As an alternative I play a lot of Zork and similar games. There was one that required solving a murder mystery that I never quite finished.

The first computer I owned was a Gateway. I can’t remember all of the specs for it but I did get to play Civilization on it. I used to spend countless hours playing this game and almost always managed to dominate the game into submission.

The last game I will mention is Everquest. I’m not sure it is technically old enough to fit into this category, but I don’t play it any longer and it’s been a long time since I have. While this games had a few predecessors, this was my first foray into MMORPG and I was hooked. I can still fondly recall the first time I left the confines of the city with my dwarf character and the sheer terror I went through in fear that I might get lost and never be able to return.

These days the I still play games when I can find brief amount of free time. A lot of it is going to Fallout 3 now – but there is still a lot of game to go. I play on the X-Box and the gamertag is Daladmera.

Things you Know Now…

jstrate — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 23:03:00 +0000

Last week I was tagged by Jason Massie to write up a few things I wish I knew as a Junior DBA. The tagging was started by Mike Walsh a couple weeks back and has been making the rounds.

Without much ado, here are some things that I’ve learned through the years that I’d wished I had known from the beginning.

Data Types Really Matter

In one of my first data warehouse projects I ran into a small issue with data typing. I used DTS to load the data to staging tables and then used stored procedures to clean it all up.

One item in particular that I needed to clean up was the dates that came through the data file. They came in the format “ddmmyyyy”. I needed to update the date string to the format “dd/mm/yyyy” prior to converting it to datetime. When I created the staging table I opted to use the data type varchar(10) to store the date string.

And this was where the problem began. In development, my multiple thousand row data file loaded without significant issues. I ran everything through a few times and thought that I had an ETL that was working pretty good. But as soon as the package was deployed to the test server things didn’t quite work out so well. The test environment used a production file that had a few million records and the ETL process came to a grinding halt.

A numerous hours of execution and troubleshooting later I discovered that the problem was the varchar(10) columns that were growing from 8 to 10 characters in length. With millions of rows and multiple columns containing unformatted date strings I was being rewarded with more page splits than I could ever want.

Changing the data type to char(10) was a little better performing. And by a little I mean the ETL finished in minutes versus hours.

Data Types Really, Really Matter

A few years later I was working on the ETL processes for another data warehouse that was aggregating cash register data for a major US retailer. The database a little bit big – at the time it was a little over 1 TB for 90 days worth of data on SQL Server 2000.

After the initial design was implemented, I went in to review some of the initial assumptions on data types and recommended some changes on int data types to smallint and tinyint. The total space savings didn’t surpass 100 GB, but it was pretty close. And the time to rebuild all of the tables was a serious pain.

Properly data typing the database ahead of time is well worth the time and effort.

Always Clean Up After Yourself

A number of years ago, I wrote a process for maintaining databases that automated a number of the basics; check db, backups, index tuning, etc. In my desire to be a verbose as necessary in the event of an error. The procedures output a small log file (1-2 KB) with each execution that could be reviewed to determine the root of any issue.

Low and behold – after a few years these small files can become large folders of data if they aren’t cleaned out on a regular basis. I had a former co-worker call a few years back asking if the files in the folder could be purged. It had grown to a few GB in size.

Since then I always make sure I incorporate clean up of any log files in the creation of any process.

Don’t Clean Up Presentations The Night Before Presenting

This one came up last year, I spent a dozen hours in the office practicing and fine tuning my demos for a SQL Server 2008 SSIS presentation. I built SQL scripts for all of the databases. They would build the databases, the data, tables, and stored procedures the presentation needed. As the final step before closing my laptop the night before the presentation, I deleted all of the databases since the scripts would rebuild them all right before the presentation.

Oops, I forgot to create a script for one of the databases and the Data Profiler demo suffered significantly because of this. I don’t play with my presentations anymore the night before.

Tagging

I am tagging:

(OT) Doctor Who

jstrate — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 00:00:00 +0000

I’m a fan of Doctor Who, both the classic series and the new series. I’ve been watching it for as long as I can remember and just recently got my three boys hooked on to it. They are actually interested enough that there has already been debate about which Doctor each will be next Halloween.

Anyways – my obsessive compulsive nature MERGED with my Doctor Who passion a couple weeks back to create the document attached to this post. I grabbed all of the Doctor Who episodes listed on Wikipedia and cross-referenced the episodes with those available on Netflix.

At some point, I am hoping to use the list to watch all available Doctor Who episodes in order of broadcast. That’s the whole obsessive-compulsive bit.

Here’s the file if anyone else in interested in the same:

Doctor Who.xls

My First Computer and Favorite Old Games (OT)