Snips

2017

February. I watched the documentary Zero Days (by Alex Gibney) recently. I had to watch it three more times because I learned a ton plus there's so many details that were easy to overlook. Talk about a book of notes! I highly recommend this documentary for anyone who wants to understand the dangers of the digital world.

Digital security is an oxymoron. Hopefully we don't learn that painfully, but if history is a guide...

June. Security continues to be a top concern and I expect this trend to continue. I'm surprised how many security professionals I meet do not know what sim-swapping is. Scary! Not related to sim-swaps but SQL Server instead, here's a recently article about audits for SQL Server - https://www.sqlshack.com/sql-server-database-architecture-and-audits-for-enhanced-security/.

November. I just finished Cybersecurity and Cyberwar by P. W. Singer and Allan Friedman. After reading it, I continue to think that digital security is an oxymoron and I hope people learn this the easy way.

Like Zero Days, this book confirms that the best approach to private data is to avoid storing it. Develop architecture to "process" data, but let the user fully control their own data.

December. I cover some benefits to using clustered columnstore indexes in SQL Server for ETL applications - https://www.mssqltips.com/sqlservertip/5225/sql-server-clustered-columnstore-index-examples-for-etl/.

2016

March. I love Rob McEwen; he reminds me of my granny - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_y5SLyuYGtU. He's right and I seldom see this point raised about mining.

May 3. In my view, this article written by Kenneth Rogoff will age extremely well https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/gold-as-emerging-market-reserve-asset-by-kenneth-rogoff-2016-05.

May 16. I actually like SQL Server replication and I would get flamed in the community for saying this, so I keep it to myself. I do think many people don't think through how they set it up or approach it from a monitoring perspective, then this costs them. Either way, here's a recent article I wrote for the SQLShack community - https://www.sqlshack.com/some-replication-architecture-errors-and-their-resolutions/.

October. My mother told me today that one of her brothers shared that uranium and the uranium was cheap. While I agree, the Fukushima disaster is still fresh in people's mind. People only change when the cost of not changing exceeds the cost of changing.

The cost of not changing has not exceeded the cost of changing, so I don't see uranium bouncing back even if it's cheap.

December. While ride-sharing today, I spoke with a part-time rancher. Cool guy. He confirmed what I learned on the farm about good mother animals - they are your prize. A good mother can produce many multiples of themselves (same with goats and chickens). You keep those prizes as long as you can. He also agreed that losing one of them feels like a huge loss because it is.

One disturbing note to myself: he said that many ranchers in the area were selling their farms for real estate development. I don't think this will age well in the future. Small ranches and husbandry usually means cheaper prices and the Frisco area looks like a good place to have livestock.

Real estate developers are the Once-lers of Texas.

2015

March. Adrian shared with me today that in his observation, object oriented developers approach databases as a trashcan. He's right in that they often don't think of how they'll get the data. This is one reason that object-oriented developers tend to dislike the SQL language because the SQL language challenges you to think of data sets, not objects. Anyone can shove data into a database, but when you need to get that data, you have to think about how you'll get that data relative to all the other data that you have.

How does one data point differ from the entire set of data? Or, if you need to return a set of the entire set of data, how would you identify that?

I remember a while back, Chris telling me that he understood where MongoDB could be useful, but he felt that most object oriented developers preferred it because they hated thinking about data storage. Granted, Chris is an exceptional C++ developer who understands SQL well (no surprise). I think MongoDB has a place, but I agree that MongoDB and any database approached with a trashcan approach will end up causing suffering for everyone.

Databases are organizational structures. In the same way that we organize our desk (how do I quickly get what I need to use), we should organize how we store our data.

July. With Texas continued growth, the state must address its drought problem sooner rather than later. One of my Aunts used to caution that Texas can never have too much water (true) and that any flood in Texas is at best brief because usually long droughts follow. The data tell the story and she's right!

(Her observation along with the oil crash provides an answer for why some people could get extremely cheap land in Texas during the 1980s.)

November. Thomas Sowell notes in Applied Economics that nothing is more certain than risk. Yet people speak about risk as if it can be controlled.

December. Not the biggest fan of the company mixture with iShares RING, but at least gold miners have an ETF! Platinum mining has none.

2014

February. How to copy a table from one database to another database in SQL Server - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ZMrw8lgYPo.

March. I hate pivot tables. Now I can just use my script in this video and viola! I have what I need - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ENC3oela9_E.

June. "We like the idea of creating code.. not managing it." Very common actually, especially with the ease of creating stored procedures. Here's how I find unused SQL Server stored procedures - https://www.mssqltips.com/sqlservertip/3243/finding-unused-sql-server-stored-procedures-with-powershell/.

In general, prevention is worth a pound of cure here. How much does it cost to remove something you don't use once you replace it? Organization.

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