T-SQL Tuesday #120 – Recap

The end of the first 10 years of T-SQL Tuesday blogging occurred this month, with me hosting T-SQL Tuesday #120. The theme this month was to talk about something you’ve seen that made you think “What were you thinking?” (you can read the invitation here). We had several bloggers jump in and post their thoughts. So let’s just jump into a quick recap of who posted what (for each blogger, I also include a link to their Twitter account, their main blog, and the link to their T-SQL Tuesday #120 post).

Rob Farley (Twitter | Blog | Article): Rob wrote about his personal documentation style, where code comments tell why it was done, not just what was done.

Kevin Chant (Twitter | Blog | Article): Kevin wrote about a neglected index on a very large table that hadn’t been reindexed in over 5 years. Which coincides with when they started getting complaints about the performance of the table.

Jon Shaulis (Twitter | Blog | Article): Jon wrote about how adding a staging table to an ETL process greatly reduced the number of deadlocks that were happening. This change minimized the chance of records never being loaded into a critical process.

Martin Surasky (Twitter | Blog | Article): Martin wrote about how a job change exposed him to a different culture. Moving from a risk-tolerant culture to a risk-adverse culture doesn’t sound very easy. Martin is also a first time T-SQL Tuesday contributor! Keep it up Martin.

Kenneth Fisher (Twitter | Blog | Article): Kenneth wrote about two things: First, a trigger calling a stored procedure that calls another stored procedure through a linked server that hits a table with yet another trigger. Secondly, a system that used SET ISOLATION LEVEL READ UNCOMMITTED on every stored procedure, and just to be sure, the NOLOCK query hint on every table reference being selected in the stored procedure.

Kevin Hill (Twitter | Blog | Article): Kevin wrote about transaction log backups being hard-coded to a specific file that uses the “WITH INIT” clause. This means that only the latest log backup is ever stored. As Kevin points out, let’s hope that they never need any other log backups between that last full and the current one for point-in-time recovery.

Shane O’Neill (Twitter | Blog | Article): Shane wrote about a first impression of examining a database, and how he ended up realizing that it was done by developers who thought of the database as a “place to shove data” and that’s all.

Todd Kleinhans (Twitter | Blog | Article): Todd wrote about an encounter with a difficult sole DBA at a company and the Peter Principle. Best line: “Who is Paul Randal?”.

Jason Brimhall (Twitter | Blog | Article):  – Jason wrote about snapshot backups being made by an antivirus program. These backups were causing connectivity and performance issues as well as interfering with the normal backup process.

I want to thank all of the bloggers for participating and making T-SQL Tuesday #120 a great event for everyone! We’ll see you next month for the start of the 11th year with T-SQL Tuesday #121.