The blog of Andy M. Mallon
Notes from the work, the community, and everything in between.
If this dog-umentation is right, can you spot all the problems in the generated arf-ifact? For years, I’ve advocated for keeping developer documentation in the same code repository as the code it describes. In the age of AI, that practice has become even more …
Continue readingWe used to call Callie "C". There’s a particular kind of writing that has become increasingly easy to produce: technically plausible, grammatically correct, reasonably well organized, and almost completely exhausting to read. You know the stuff–it has a lot …
Continue readingSQL Agent’s schema is older than me. It handles dates, times, and durations like it’s 1980 by using integers instead of date/time data types. My buddy Aaron Bertrand talks more about Dating Responsibly so that you can have a good datetime with your own …
Continue readingStatistics auto-updates are generally a good thing–auto-update of statistics is the default behavior in SQL Server. Having the freshest information about the data “shape” helps to inform the best selection of an execution plan for queries. Except for when it …
Continue readingFor this month's T-SQL Tuesday, Brent Ozar (blog|Instagram) asks us to describe the most recent ticket we closed. “We had a pretty significant wait spike…” The literal last ticket I closed was “please run this script in production…”, and I don’t think it …
Continue readingElphie wearing her "I bark at bigots" pawkerchief I've seen more and more events & communities adopt Codes of Conduct. Even local events, local user groups, and smaller online communities are adopting Codes of Conduct. That's GREAT! ...but it's just a great …
Continue readingI recently saw a question on DBA Stack Exchange (it has since been deleted by the author), who had a “special process” that ran regularly, and as part of that process, they disabled the trigger, did some stuff, and re-enabled it. During that process, the step …
Continue readingElphaba the pup is growing up! I'm not going to beat around the bush. I hate the `SERVERPROPERTY()` and `DATABASEPROPERTYEX()` system functions. Loathing The thing I hate the most about these two functions is that you need to know the right magic spells to …
Continue readingBack in my day, we stored SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) packages in msdb, or the file system. Well, I’m neither dead nor retired, so that’s not an accurate statement–today is still “my time.” But when I was learning about SQL Server, those were the …
Continue readingFor this month's T-SQL Tuesday, John McCormack (blog|twitter) asks us: “What are your go-to short, handy scripts”? I've got so many handy dandy scripts, it was hard to choose. Where to start? I have so many go-to scripts that are short, amazing, and I use all …
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