SQL

This month’s Meme15 assignment and the first was chosen by Jason Strate (Blog|Twitter) he posed the assignment of writing about why do I blog and why I started.

I started blogging back in 2003 just about a one year after launching Gogorichie.com, back then it was the social network of its time along with AIM and YIM. As me and my high school friends went off to college we stayed in contact via our blogs. You know this topic made me go back to the very beginning and read my very first blog posting. It brought up memories of living in LA and the good times I had out there. Wait most of those post were written after coming home from a night out so a lot of the postings were run but all fun.

This month’s T-SQL Tuesday topic is from Allen White. He posed the question of what is my favorite little SQL trick. I can’t wait to see what tips the #SQLFamily write about. I discovered one of my favorite tricks last year, just a little background my first SQL version I started out administrating and developing on 8 years ago was SQL 2000 back then to get table statistics was no easy task. These days you just need to right-click on the database and go the reports to get much of the information you’ll need about a database. I started using SQL 2008 last year so when I when wrote a blog post about this little trick I came across online on how to quickly pull the table size information it had been one of my favorite tricks then. Since I’m still dealing with data in SQL 2000 server production environment still this trick still comes in handy. Thanks to the posting by Mitchel Sellers on How to Determine Table Size it’s become quick and easy to get the information I need about my databases.

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.

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: * Pinal Dave (Blog | @pinaldave) * Brent Ozar (Blog | @BrentO) * Thomas Larock (Blog | @sqlrockstar) * BIDN (Blog | @bidn)

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.

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.