T-SQL Tuesday #99: Dealer's choice (invite)
February 6th, 201836
T-SQL Tuesday #99: Dealer's choice (invite)
February 6th, 201836
 
 

T-SQL TuesdayI am honored to be hosting the 99th installment of T-SQL Tuesday. Can you believe this monthly blog party has been going on, month in and month out, since 2009? This is a great way for a bunch of us to get together, every four weeks or so, and blog about something along the same topic. What a great idea by Adam Machanic and now, looking back, I feel a bit guilty for not hosting until now!

Wayne Gretzky - His jersey number has been retired by the entire sport, not just by his teams.Gretzky's jersey number, #99, is retired by the entire sport.

Getting to this month's topic, when I think of the number 99, I think of a variety of things. As a Canadian who has collected hockey cards since age 5, though, the strongest association I have is with Wayne Gretzky. I don't expect there's a massive overlap with hockey fans in this audience, but I have to imagine most of you know who he is, and how much he has meant to the sport. The card pictured here is not a particularly valuable card, but it is one of my most prized possessions. It has always been one of my favorite cards of #99, and whenever I see it, I get this huge wave of nostalgia from my childhood winters – playing hockey, watching Hockey Night in Canada, and cracking open a few packs of hockey cards with whatever was left of my allowance.

Anyway, I was torn when thinking about the topic. I feel like there have been a lot of professional development flavors in recent months, which kind of distances the content from its namesake. At the same time, those types of posts tend to draw a lot of interest, and in the end give us all greater insights into the personalities and opinions of other folks in the community. They almost force us all to get to know each other better, and I think that's a great thing. Are you with me so far, #SQLFamily?

So here's what I'm going to do: I'm going to offer you a choice.

Behind door #1:

In the spirit of my revelations about still being a hockey card nerd after all these years, and after seeing Drew Furgiuele's great post on #sqlibirum, I would love to hear about something you are passionate about, outside of the SQL Server or tech community. Bonus points if it's a passion that might surprise the rest of us. Play the Zeusaphone? Excel in Segway Polo? Forge Samurai swords? Coach a chess boxer or extreme ironer? Maybe you dabble in toilet seat art? Tell me about it! Show me proof! If you choose door #1, I hope your post is full of pictures or other media, and not just a wall of text. Let's keep it PG, though, OK?

Behind door #2:

Since many of you might be uncomfortable talking about your non-technical passions, I'll give you an escape pod back to the more familiar. I have a long laundry list of T-SQL bad habits (there's a big index here). What's your favorite one? Which one do you disagree with most vehemently? What bad habits are missing from my list? This is not entrapment; I promise I'm not going to bait you into writing something just so I can argue with you. I'm really interested in reading your opinions and, also, to have more material I can point to when I talk about bad habits and/or best practices.

The Rules

Like all the T-SQL Tuesdays that have come before (and that one time we did it on a Wednesday – yes, really), the usual rules apply:

  • Publish your post on or after midnight, UTC, on Tuesday, February 13th, and before midnight, UTC, on Wednesday, February 14th. For those of you familiar with my datetime rants, you know that that can only be expressed in one way:
     
    WHERE PublishDateUTC >= '20180213' 
      AND PublishDateUTC <  '20180214';
    -- BETWEEN does not work here, at least not reliably
  • Feature the T-SQL Tuesday logo. You can copy Michael Swart's high-quality image above, but please don't hot-link.
  • If you tweet about your post, use the #TSQL2sday hash tag. If you are new to blogging, please also feel free to use the #SQLNewBlogger hash tag.

Once your post is complete, leave a comment here. Don't trust that I'll see your tweet; I'm still catching up on twitter from last week.

As you probably expect, I'll write a roundup post after the deadline, and then we can all wait with crazy anticipation for Adam's invitation for #100!

By: Aaron Bertrand

I am a passionate technologist with industry experience dating back to Classic ASP and SQL Server 6.5. I am a long-time Microsoft MVP, write at Simple Talk, SQLPerformance, and MSSQLTips, and have had the honor of speaking at more conferences than I can remember. In non-tech life, I am a husband, a father of two, a huge hockey and football fan, and my pronouns are he/him.

36 Responses

  1. LadyRuna says:

    I know I'm nearly a week late, but I just saw this today and decided to put in my piece: http://ladyruna.blogspot.com/2018/02/t-sql-tuesday-99-passion-for-sewing.html

  2. Lisa Bohm says:

    Forgot to leave a comment, but I did post a blog! http://lisagb.info/archives/43!

  3. I was very busy yesterday, and while you can schedule blogs posts and tweets in advance, you cannot (AFAIK) schedule comments.

    So a delayed comment pointing to a post that was made on time: https://sqlserverfast.com/blog/hugo/2018/02/t-sql-tuesday-99-dealers-choice/ – with more about my personal life than you ever wanted to know.

  4. Peter Schott says:

    Posted about music and singing for my entry. (Considered board games, but I think I spend more time w/ music than gaming.)

  5. Jo Douglass says:

    Hi Aaron, thanks for hosting this month! I ended up writing on both topics – I really wanted to do the first topic, but I have so few technical posts up that it felt like cheating. So here's part 1 (about bad habits/best practices) and part 2 (about me):

    https://blog.jodouglass.co.uk/t-sql-tuesday-99-part-1-date-time-habits/

    https://blog.jodouglass.co.uk/t-sql-tuesday-99-part-2-lizards-and-gps/

  6. Nate says:

    I actually got one done on-time for once! :o) https://natethedba.wordpress.com/2018/02/13/t-sql-tuesday-99-counting-rows-the-less-hard-way/ Pleasure reading yours as always!

  7. Hi Aaron – Thank you for T-SQL Tuesday topics. Here's my blog entry: http://www.lucasnotes.com/2018/02/t-sql-tuesday-99-work-life-balance.html.

  8. Andy Yun says:

    Fun topic Aaron! Here's a link to my post in case ping back doesn't work right.

    https://blogs.sentryone.com/andyyun/missing-indexes-and-key-order/

  9. Melissa says:

    Thanks for hosting! 🙂 T-SQL Tuesday #99 : My #sqlibrium http://bakeituntilyoucakeit.com/2018/02/13/t-sql-tuesday-99-my-sqlibirum/

  10. Here is my TSQL Tuesday Post. Oh! The places you will Go! http://john.deardurff.com/tsql-tuesday-99/

  11. Bert Wagner says:

    Thanks for hosting a great topic this month Aaron. Excited to read what everyone else writes about. Here's my post: https://bertwagner.com/2018/02/13/what-i-do-when-im-not-writing-sql/

  12. thanks Aaron for hosting this month, great range of topics!

    Here´s my addition

    https://www.sqldoubleg.com/2018/02/13/t-sql-tuesday-99-great-debates-unicode/

  13. Martin Guth says:

    Here's my contribution (door #2) about choosing a correct data type for id columns
    http://www.martinguth.de/database-administration/why-i-chose-int-rather-than-bigint-for-id-columns/