Fivethirtyeight ran a poll, asking how much people who used PEDs should have their careers altered. 41% said ignore the controversy and take stats as is -- my view as well -- but a sizable proportion also said to simply discount the stats. Click the link for more, but here's the scary part. If you take…
Fun With SQL Equality
T-SQL has some interesting concepts regarding string equality: Trailing spaces are not enough to consider a string to be unique. Subscripts and superscripts are not enough to consider a string to be unique. If you need to put a unique index on an NVARCHAR column, the best bet might be to add a SHA1 hash…
Ranking the Star Wars games I’ve played
As an ode to the wonderful guide provided by PC Gamer, here is a ranked list of all of the Star Wars games I played. Dishonorable mention: Force Commander. I played it for about five minutes because the camera controls are wretchedly terrible. It's an RTS -- the camera should be the least complicated part of…
Get Row Counts For Partitioned Tables
I'm adding this query to my SQL utility belt. This query tells you, for a specific table, all of the partitions, the lowest value in that partition's range, and the (estimated) number of records in that partition. This query has a couple of good uses. The first is that you can monitor a backfill with it.…
Thoughts On In-Memory OLTP
A Steve Jones editorial from a few weeks ago got me thinking about In-Memory OLTP. We implemented this in our data warehouse about a month ago to mixed success. Here are my notes from that forum post as well as a couple of areas in which I figured I could expand upon my comments there.…
36 Chambers - The Legendary Journeys: Execution to the max! 