Lots of blog posts for this month, for the first T-SQL Tuesday to leave the safe-haven of Adam Machanic’s blog. Some people obviously missed out, probably because they don’t read this blog, but I guess that’s the nature of the meme. I don’t know who is hosting next month yet, but I’ll be looking out for Adam to post something about it in early March.
All the posts had to appear as trackbacks or comments on the invitation to participate, but this post is a short summary for posterity.
As the second week of February involves Valentine’s Day (and a few days earlier, my wedding anniversary), I thought the topic of Relationships would be a nice one for this event. There was a good range of topics too, which I have ordered by the type of relationships chosen.
Special mention:
It wasn’t quite on the right day, but a big congratulations to Michelle Ufford who almost managed to time the birth of her new baby Chloe for T-SQL Tuesday.
We have “purely technical” posts:
Brad Schulz is keeping the bar way too high, and if you haven’t read his pieces from previous Tuesdays, then I recommend you go through the history of posts on his blog. This month he has written a letter of disappointment to the FROM clause. At some point Brad will likely be asked to compile these posts into a book, but until that happens, you’ll have to follow the link to his blog. It’s entertaining, but still fits in the “purely technical” category.
John Dunleavy demonstrated (complete with screenshots – something I should put more of in my posts) how foreign keys can be made so easily using the Diagram part of Management Studio. It’s not something I do much of, but I have to admit that reading posts like John’s can often inspire me to changing my ways.
Bryan Smith also talked about database diagrams, and how they can be used to discover relationships in a system.
Michael Coles officially missed the deadline, but I’m going to link to him anyway, demonstrating a nice trick for creating a Product aggregate based on the relationship between a number and its logarithm.
Allen White wrote about the fact that any RDBMS should have relationships to really be considered relational. Great reminder of some of the basics.
Marco Russo timed a piece on relating tables in DAX amazingly well, and only realised that it qualified for T-SQL Tuesday after he had initially posted it. Useful piece, which will appear in search engine results for years to come I’m sure.
Rob Farley wrote a pile of rubbish… hey, that’s me! I wrote about the importance of relationships in a database system to help the Query Optimizer do its job. I also surmised that Foreign Keys using candidate keys (rather than the primary key) might help many queries do away with needing joins. If you have thoughts on that I’d still like to hear them.
Some posts that were about less technical relationships:
Jen McCown wrote about how she left her husband Sean, in a piece called ‘I love you, I quit’. Actually, she was just leaving a job, but it’s a nice piece about the degradation of a employer-employee relationship. It rings too true for all of us I think, and I hope that as an employer I manage to ‘keep the mystery’ for my employees to stop them going through that same experience.
Jason Brimhall wrote about some of the different relationships in his life, particularly how he wants to make sure that the Parent-Child relationship in his life doesn’t become a Foreign relationship. Nicely done Jason.
Allen Kinsel recommends that relationships with professional organisations can be deepened, and that this can be very beneficial. I’m sure he’s right. I have a tendency to get extra-involved in groups, and I hope Allen’s sentiments are heard by many.
The link to Steve Jones’ article must’ve changed. The link that I followed today didn’t work, even though I’d read it successfully a couple of days ago. Still, I managed to find it, and I can thoroughly recommend reading about the relationships between Steve and his colleagues. He’s most definitely correct in pointing out that any effort in developing personal relationships with your colleagues will help you get things done!
And some “combination” posts:
Mike Walsh provided the first piece of the day, with an excellent run down of various types of relationships that are important, including a recommendation to read up on database design. Great advice, Mike. Thanks.
With Kalen Delaney’s post we almost got two for the price of one. A brilliant prelude talking about some of the personal relationships that have enhanced her SQL career, followed up by covering how foreign key relationships have developed through the versions of SQL Server. Kalen’s blog posts are always worth reading, as I’m sure everyone who is reading this post appreciates.
Stuart Ainsworth’s piece was on Maslow, drawing parallels between the hierarchy of needs of a person with the hierarchy of needs of a database system. It’s thought-provoking, and something that I feel could be made into a poster for database developers’ walls.
In summary
I’d like to thank everyone who has taken part, and for Adam for having introduced the T-SQL Tuesday concept to us. Keep your eye on his blog to find out what’s going on next month. If your name isn’t listed here, then I encourage you to write something for March.
Also remember that lots of these people are on Twitter and are very much followable. Look at the hashtag #tsql2sday for related posts, and make sure you follow the people who post blogs for these events.
