25Nov

Meme Monday: What #SQLFamily Means To Me

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I saw this topic a few weeks back on @sqlrockstar‘s site but never got around to writing a post.

I’ve been in working on databases for about 6 years now a mixture of Access, SQL, Teradata, and MySQL. So when I saw the topic thoughts began to flow through my brain. What does the SQL Family mean to me?? it means that there is a network of people with the same interest, challenged by the same problems as me. Now with my discovery of twitter, hence the hashtag I’ve been able to discovered the family and discovered local events such as the user groups in Chicago and SQL Saturday’s events and many others including a yearly cruise. Now when i need help with programming question I can turn to the #sqlfamily, the people are so cool that when its someone’s birthday or other special occasion they get acknowledged by the #sqlfamily or even a sad event the family member off words of comfort.

04Apr

Meme Monday 4-4-11

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First off shout out to Thomas Larock for coming up with this idea. Today’s meme is “Write a SQL blog post in 11 words or less”, and here is my entry:

Write query. Syntax error. Search Google. run query again. Happy dance!!!!

Some more shout outs to my favorite readings from last month:

30Dec

2010 In Review

Filed in Blogging | Jaycees/JCI | Married Life | SQL | Work 2 Comments

2010 was a very exciting year most importantly i got married. I wanted to share with you some of my most memorable moments from the year.

  • Served on the US Jaycees staff as the website program manager
  • Got Married
  • Got Promoted
  • Became a uncle
  • Discovered a large community of SQL users on twitter
  • Then discovered SQL Saturday through a Jaycee thanks @grr_geek via twitter then won a xbox 360 through the event.
  • Led the effort to bring a Jaycees chapter to Des Plaines, IL
  • Recruited a jaycee member through twitter
  • Completed JCI Presenter and JCI Trainer course thanks to Megan and Beth for the teamwork.
  • Went to Las Vegas with my wife on our honeymoon
  • Went to New Orleans for our Jaycees National Meeting
  • Learned when to sit back and watch the drama unfold

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

14Dec

T-SQL Tuesday #13: Interacting With The Business

Filed in SQL | Work 1 Comment

I come from a different world in my company, I’m not IT though I have formal training, I speak the lingo, and wear the uniform of Jeans, t-shirt, glasses and ton’s of geekieness in my swagger. I’m what they call Business Intelligence or better known as Shadow IT.  Though i’m up front about what we do and the impact it has. In my company I’m the middle person between what the business thinks it wants and what it really needs long term. Most of time what they really want is a short term solution. You know something quick and dirty to fix the bleeding of money and correct behavior.

So in response to Steve Jones T-SQL question of the week “What issues have you had in interacting with the business to get your job done?” For me it all boils down to communication. If I’m not understanding what the issue is then I can’t deliver what they want. But after fully understanding what it is they’re asking for and making sure they’re aware of what they are asking for. I can begin to focus how to impact the issue without investing a lot time, money, resources, and the long term strategic goal of the business and address the problem.

20Oct

Using DateDiff to Control Content

Filed in SQL | Work 1 Comment

 

Last Friday I got a data request from a group asking for a report to be generated bi-hourly for customer request that were not responded to in a time span of two hours. So looking at the data I noticed that there were two columns that were time stamped one when the request was submitted and another when the request was completed, so this was easy I filtered out where the completed data was null and wrote a where statement using a Datediff syntax to breakdown the input date time stamp by hour and then subtracting two so my sql statement looks like the following example.

 

————————————————————————————————————–

SELECT recID, inputDateTime, customername, phonenumber, address, emailaddress, requestcomment
FROM      dbo.VIEW_CustomerOrders_SCRUB
WHERE  (DATEDIFF(hh, inputDateTime, GETDATE()) = 2)

————————————————————————————————————–

Now if you wanted to change it up and make the date two days instead of hours you could easily change the hh argument to dd and so fourth. On the MSDN page from Microsoft they do a good job at covering how to use the datediff arguments to get different results. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms189794(v=SQL.90).aspx

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