Year 2: May 2015 – May 2016

May 17, 2019 Andy 2

In Year 1, I only wrote 6 blog posts. In Year 2, I decided to take things seriously, and kicked things into high gear. During this 12-month period, I wrote 36 blog posts–my best 12-months as far as pace & productivity in these five years.

Year 1: May 2014 – May 2015

May 16, 2019 Andy 0

I’ve lost my blog stats for that first year, so I can’t say exactly how many visitors I had. I can say that the number of views was so low that it didn’t matter. If I were going to offer a generous estimate, I would guess I got whopping 100 page views in year one (mostly from me). I wrote a total of six blog posts that year. Let’s look at two of my favorites.

Blogging on a whim

May 15, 2019 Andy 0

On May 16, 2014, I bought a domain on a whim. I’d been sitting in the NOCC at my employer, helping with maintenance. I was waiting on another team to perform their task, and champing at the bit. Over the next week, I set up a Blogger website, tied my domain to it, and thought about what I’d done at work recently that might be worth sharing.

#LGBT channel on SQL Slack!

May 14, 2019 Andy 1

Last night while having dinner with my husband, I had a thought and messaged Chrissy LeMaire (blog|twitter) on the SQL Server Community Slack. Thoughts on an LGBTQ channel here? I doubt it would be very active… But I’d love to have a spot for the … [Read More]

What the heck is downtime, anyway?

April 15, 2019 Andy 2

There’s a lot of discussion about preventing downtime. As a DBA and IT professional, it’s my sworn duty to prevent downtime. I usually describe my job as DBA something along the lines of, “to make sure data is always available to the people and applications … [Read More]

Code to purge data based on creation date

April 4, 2019 Andy 6

Yesterday, I talked about batching deletes, and the day before I talked about how much I like to delete data, and why it’s necessary to do it, despite being a data pack rat. Today, let’s look at just one scenario, and how I like to handle it. In my experience, this is one of the most common purge requirements (and probably the easiest), so first, let’s look at the business requirements.

Purging data with batched deletes

April 3, 2019 Andy 2

Yesterday, I wrote about the importance of planning your data purges. Today, let’s look at the simplest requirement for purging data: Keep data for X days after it’s created.

The thrill of purging old data

April 2, 2019 Andy 0

DBAs & Data professionals tend to be digital packrats. My personal Google Drive is filled with random files that I refused to part with–even though it’s of questionable value. I lament that I do not have a copy of every paper I typed in high school or college–and I envy those who do. You never know when you’ll need notes from that meeting 6 years ago, or when you’ll need that funny GIF you created for an inside joke you no longer remember.