The two most exciting things to happen are that (a) I passed my Grade 4 AMEB Cello exam a few weeks ago, and (b) I passed my TOGAF 9.2 certification exam the other day. The Azure and Architecture Certifications project page has been updated with my new badge. The cello exam certainly ended up being a bit stressful. First of all, my teacher of 2 years has developed a shoulder injury and could no longer teach from November, so I had to find someone new....
I do enough MS SQL Server work every day that I thought it was worth spending a little bit of time writing about five optimisation techniques that I think about every time I need to work on a query. Very often I see code that doesn’t consider these issues and it can make a huge difference to the runtime of a stored procedure, the memory/CPU usage, and even the time it takes you to test things....
This was an error I encounted the other week at work and I thought it worth sharing as it’s a bit of a gotcha. You normally expect that temp tables are fine to share names across sessions since they are designed to be temporary. However, there are a few times when conflicts can occur. See this post on MSSQL Tips for more details. Basically, if we don’t do any of the things that disallow caching, then trying to re-use a temp table name in a “inner” called stored procedure will cause a conflict....
I had an interesting problem at work the other day. One of our nightly ETL steps was returning this error: “The maximum system-generated unique value for a duplicate group was exceeded for index with partition ID . Dropping and re-creating the index may resolve this; otherwise, use another clustering key.” I admit it was something I had never seen before, so of course a quick trip to Google is in order....
A couple of weeks before the December 2021 holidays, I attended a four day TOGAF training course. It was my introduction to Enterprise Architecture. The content was relatively interesting, and a very new perspective on things for me. I have always been involved in the nitty-gritty - creating reports, deploying dashboards, optimising code, implementing ETL. To think about the architecture rather than the actual construction was…refreshing. The actual Open Group framework we studied doesn’t sit that well with me....