ROB SYMONDS

Jack White on Restriction and Creativity

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I have a fascination with The White Stripes. It’s amazing to me how much they can do with so little.

In this roughly two minute clip, Jack White talks about the things that foster their creativity.

There are two main takeaways here:

1. You don’t always wake up inspired and you don’t really need to. Get to work anyway. You still may come up with something good. I would add that inspiration often follows getting started anyway.

2. Create a box and then work within that box. Restrictions and constraints can foster creativity. Too many options and a lack of constraints can kill creativity. The White Stripes have chosen certain restrictions and constraints to continually force themselves to be creative.

SSIS Output to Multiple Files

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Let’s say a user asks you to create a flat file output from a database query. Piece of cake. Open SSMS, write the query, run it and copy the results (with headers using SSMS 2008) into a text file. Send the user the file and and you’re done with time left over for a siesta.

But oh wait—they want to be able to open it in an older version of Excel, which will only display ~ 65k rows per sheet. This file has 190k rows. So they ask you to write the output to multiple files, limiting the total rows per file to 60k.

Now what?

You could simply open the raw flat file, go to line 60,001 and cut-paste lines 60,001–120,000 into another file and repeat as necessary. That’s ok for a one-off task but not a good strategy if you are going to be doing this several times. It can be cumbersome and error prone to manually create several files this way.

No—the better approach is to make SSIS do the heavy lifting. I had to do this recently and thought I’d share my solution. [Read more…] about SSIS Output to Multiple Files

Journey vs. Destination

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Things won are done; joy’s soul lies in the doing.
— Shakespeare

The other day I was watching a television series which, at the beginning of each episode, had a voiceover announce “Previously on…” before showing a string of clips to recap all the important plot points in the past few episodes.

If you just watched those clips at the start of each episode and skipped the episodes, you could still get the whole story arc and save a heap of time. [Read more…] about Journey vs. Destination

The Well-Dressed DBA

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You may not be aware of this fact but DBAs (database administrators) are actually world renowned for their impeccable display of sartorial savvy. What the average person knows about fashion would fit nicely within a CHAR(4) field. What the DBA knows about fashion requires a VARCHAR(MAX) field. At least.

(Although the author assumes that many of the excellent recommendations below apply to both male and female DBA alike, he is wrong from time to time, like the time he shrunk let a friend shrink a database, and so will below address the male only.)

We begin at the bottom and work our way to the top… [Read more…] about The Well-Dressed DBA