May 2010 - Posts

• Striving to be boring - or at least have boring systems

  A developer I work with, whom I respect a great deal, reminded me of this truism today. I'm not sure who came up with the original, but they deserve credit wherever they are: “A good system administrator is a bored system administrator.” As a DBA, this Read More... Posted Wednesday, May 26, 2010 10:56 PM by merrillaldrich | 6 Comments

• Enjoy Portland SQL Saturday without me

  I was incredibly psyched to go to SQL Saturday #27 in Portland, but alas Sunday is my older son Will's birthday, and I can't manage both events in the same weekend. Chalk it up to work-life balance. Anyway, if you are going, have a great time! And maybe Read More... Posted Friday, May 21, 2010 11:24 AM by merrillaldrich | 1 Comments Filed under: community events, training

• Worst code I've written in a while

  Here's a nice, compact bit of WTF-ery I had to write for a prod issue today: Again: UPDATE TOP ( 1 ) dbo . someTable SET field3 = 'NEW' WHERE field2 = 'NEW' AND field3 = '' IF @@ROWCOUNT > 0 GOTO Again Can you guess from the code what awesomesauce Read More... Posted Thursday, May 20, 2010 11:44 AM by merrillaldrich | 11 Comments