Humor Archives - Page 2 of 4 - Brent Ozar Unlimited®

T-SQL & Development

Stupid T-SQL Tricks

June 6, 2018

Presented without comment:
[crayon-6a7398c4c29cf896015471/]
Next up, can you break up a query with spaces? Yep:
[crayon-6a7398c4c29da805890539/]
Well if you can do that - can you break up a query across lines? Sure you can:
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And now, brace yourself: this one is so weird that I can't even embed it in the blog. I'm just going to show you a picture of it first:

News & Opinion

Stuff People Tell Me Is The Default

May 18, 2018

Playing The Odds
Assuming that life carries on as usual for a couple more weeks, I'll have been a consultant here for three years.

In that time, I've had some really interesting conversations with people, mostly about why things are the way they are on their servers.

News & Opinion

How To Break SQL Server’s XML Data Collection

April 7, 2018

Oh, XML
When we first met, it was about 2011. I had to load files full of you into a table. It wasn't so bad.

You were well-formed, and didn't change from file to file. Even using SQL Server 2005, I could take you.

[Video] Office Hours 2018/04/01 with guest host Nigel Foulkes-Nock

April 1, 2018

Today's Office Hours is brought to you by NigelDBA.com:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZWNxWbKo1Q4&feature=youtu.be

How to Throttle Logins to SQL Server

February 20, 2018

So, uh, you can use WAITFOR in a logon trigger:
[crayon-6a7398c4cd5c7592685843/]
You probably don't want it to be TOO long, lest their app report it as a connection timeout. You want it just slow enough to make them angry.

I mean, theoretically. I would certainly never do anything like this. And I'm certainly not as diabolical as Dave Dustin:

News & Opinion

#TSQL2sday: What I’m Passionate About – Sas Christian’s Art

February 13, 2018

For this month's T-SQLTuesday, Aaron Bertrand asked what we're passionate about - but outside of the tech community, and asked for pictures. Seems like a great way to get to know about us.

From my personal blog and my Instagram feed, you probably already know that I'm into cars, travel, and food, so I wanted to pick something different to share with you.

T-SQL & Development

Creating Insert Triggers to Silently Ignore Data You Don’t Want

February 8, 2018

Say you've got an application that insists on inserting data into the database, and...you don't want the data.

You want the application to THINK it inserted the data - you don't want to roll it back or return an error to the end user. You just don't want the data, and you don't want the hassle of deleting it later.

News & Opinion

Database History: The Inventor of the Data Page

December 15, 2017

Do you ever wonder about the history of the systems you rely on every day?

They didn't teach us database history in school. Instead, we got calculus and art and interpretive dance. Fat lot of good that did us, right?

News & Opinion

Can you prevent deletes and inserts without a WHERE clause from running?

December 14, 2017

File this under bad idea thong
In the tradition of Klaus Aschenbrenner wanting to prevent people from writing SELECT * queries, I thought it might be nice to prevent people from running deletes or updates without a WHERE clause.

In a vaguely scientific way.

News & Opinion

French makes everything sound so sexy.

October 20, 2017

Even error messages:
[crayon-6a7398c4ce434050686411/]
Produces:

These sound better than anything I would ever write in a romantic letter:

Bad Idea Jeans: Finding Undocumented Trace Flags

October 4, 2017

I need to start this blog post with a disclaimer: you should not be doing this. Hell, *I* should not be doing this. But when SQL Server 2017 came out Monday, I noticed a few unusual SNAPSHOT_MATERIALIZATION entries in sys.messages and a few related undocumented system objects that hinted about a new feature Microsoft hadn't…

News & Opinion

The Ghosts of Temp Tables Past

September 19, 2017

True story
You may find it hard to believe, but I recently had to fix a small bug in sp_BlitzCache and sp_BlitzQueryStore.

Since both stored procedures have similar functions, they also share some temp table names (mainly the ones for parsing down XML nodes to more manageable chunks).

Performance Tuning

How to Drop All Your Indexes – Fast

August 11, 2017

Sometimes I need to reset stuff during performance training classes. I know some of you teach classes, too, and some of you just like doing crazy stuff. So here you go, a stored procedure to lose weight fast: DropIndexes for SQL Server 2016 & Newer [crayon-6a7398c4cf696142174710/] DropIndexes for SQL Server 2008-2014 This one doesn't include…

News & Opinion

There’s Something Funny About Variable Assignment

June 28, 2017

Guess who
I'm going to give you three queries, and you have to guess what the output will be before you run them.

Here they are:
[crayon-6a7398c4cfc9d085742949/]
Go ahead
Feel free to sub in the compatibility level that your databases are actually in before running these on your own server.

Performance Tuning

Why Your Biggest Query Plans Don’t Show Up in Some DMVs

June 2, 2017

SQL Server has three ways to get execution plans from the plan cache:

sys.dm_exec_query_plan - around since SQL Server 2005
sys.dm_exec_text_query_plan - added in 2005 SP2
sys.query_store_plan - new in SQL Server 2016

T-SQL & Development

Bad Idea Jeans: Multiple Index Hints

May 26, 2017

I hate that you can do this
Here's the thing: I'm mostly writing this because I didn't know you could do it.

But it's cool, because it'll reinforce some other concepts, and I'll show you why you shouldn't do it.

News & Opinion

CTEs, Views, and NOLOCK

March 29, 2017

This is a post because it surprised me
It might also save you some time, if you're the kind of person who uses NOLOCK everywhere. If you are, you're welcome. If you're not, thank you. Funny how that works!

I was looking at some code recently, and saw a CTE. No big deal. The syntax in the CTE had no locking hints, but the select from the CTE had a NOLOCK hint. Interesting. Does that work?!

News & Opinion

First Responder Kit Release: We hired Brent back because he promised to fix his code

March 21, 2017

March comes in like a 40 of Steel Reserve and leaves like your memory of the night after drinking a 40 of Steel Reserve.

Get it here!
sp_Blitz Improvements
-- #758 and #756 We made it less scary to run on Express Edition. Why? Because running Express Edition is scary enough. Coded by @Totty1973 and @BrentOzar

News & Opinion

I’m just saying it’s valid T-SQL syntax, that’s all.

February 24, 2017

News & Opinion

Stupid Things I’ve Done With SQL

November 15, 2016

I Always Enjoy Reminiscing
And that header is a lie. I do enjoy thinking about stuff I used to have to do at work, because I don't have to do it anymore. While we mostly gripe about the on-call stuff, the late night maintenance windows, etc., we don't usually talk about the goofy stuff we've done. What follows is a non-comprehensive (and embarrassing code free) list of things I've done with SQL that I really should have used something else to do.