I apologize for not posting any new content in quite some time, but now I am back and will soon start posting on a (hopefully!) regular basis once again. The reason for my hiatus was a pretty good one, though: I recently became a father with the birth of my son Benjamin on October 2, 2008!
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OK, boys and girls, it's time for the mailbag! There's lots of stuff to cover, so let's get to it! — Greg E writes:
Hello Jeff,I just found your blog and wanted to know if you could point me in the right direction or possibly toss me a solution.
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Introduction I have been writing my little blog here for some time now, and my favorite part of doing this is of course the feedback. It's always great to hear from the readers, to have mistakes corrected, to debate various topics and techniques, and to learn a lot about SQL and the various topics I discuss here.
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Hello and welcome to the 98th edition of Log Buffer. My name is Jeff Smith and I will hosting this week's exciting episode. If, for some reason, you are not completely satisfied with this edition, simply write in and complain to Dave over at The Pythian Group and you will receive Log Buffer #99 absolutely free!
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Welcome! The reason you were directed here is because you need assistance, and I am here to help. I am not, however, here to provide you with any answers! You see, it looks like the assistance you need is not finding an answer; it is rather that you need assistance finding a question.
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Let's say you are struggling on a programming project. Your code is growing exponentially and becoming more convoluted by the day, and it is clearly out of control. You're getting run-time errors, compile-time errors, wrong output, no output, endless loops, your machine is overheating, and perhaps you are starting to feel like you might be a little over your head.
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Ah, this is not an anti-identity rant, don't worry! Though, in a round-a-bout sort of way, it is yet another argument against always blindly using them – but not in the way you might expect.
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Raise your hand if you've ever done this:
At a programming forum that you regularly visit, you see a post asking for help The post describes a situation that you may not intimately familiar with, or that you know has been covered elsewhere many times, and it is clear a quick Google search will find a good answer.
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As David Letterman would say, wake the kids, call the neighbors, it's time for The Mailbag! Just some quickies today. Christopher writes:
Greetings Jeff, First and foremost, great job with all of the blogs.
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Every now and then I see T-SQL code written like this:
select somecolumn as 'columnname'from sometable Notice that 'columnname', despite its appearance, is not a string literal or a string expression, it is the alias that we are assigning to the column somecolumn.
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A occasional question seen in the forums, which was just recently asked today, is:
"I know I can use SELECT * FROM tableto get all of the columns from a table, but is there a way to write SELECT * minus columnXFROM Tableto get all of the columns except for certain ones?
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Sorry for the delay, Denis; thinking of ways to improve our developer skills is a great idea, thank you for including me. Here are my thoughts on the next 6 months.
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I recently submitted my Data in tables versus data in code post from a ways back to reddit, and I was surprised that there ended up being quite a bit of discussion about it.
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Server: Msg 8120, Level 16, State 1, Line 1Column 'xyz' is invalid in the select list because it is not contained in either an aggregate function or the GROUP BY clause.
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Database design can be very complicated, and it truly is an art as opposed to a science; sometimes there are multiple correct ways to model the same data with pros and cons to each.
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A couple of quick blog updates for those that are interested: A Comment Milestone! Recently, I realized that I have received 1,000 comments since this little blog was started way back in September 2003.
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Let's open up the mailbag! In today's exciting episode, Nemo writes:
Hi, I am doing a project that my boss "requires" to be done in Access, even though we have MS SQL server 2005!
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You are a very important, talented, enterprise-level programmer! You write and maintain millions of lines of code, compiling your applications takes several hours, and your databases contain hundreds of tables with millions of rows.
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A Google search for the phrase
sql "case statement" returns 127,000 results. Meanwhile, if we do a search for the phrase sql "case expression" we get back only 43,900 results.
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Studies have shown that the "F1" key is the least commonly pressed key on today's keyboards! Ok, well maybe not actual studies, but from my own experience, I am convinced that on many keyboards here around the world the F1 key still has that shiny "new key" look and smell because it's never been used.
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