Who am I?
My name is Thom. I'm British and live in the South East of England. I'm fairly new in the SQL Server world compared to many more famous names you may know, as I've gained all experience with SQL Server and its related tools since early 2014 (I'm also probably a little younger too!). I work for a small Insurance Brokers as a DBA and SQL Developer, and have now started writing some of my thoughts and ideas here to share. I've also written a few articles at SQL Server Central and will continue to do so from time to time when I feel something is more than just my "thought child".
My goal is to become more versed in the world of SQL Server and continue to learn more and more about it. One of the best ways I find doing that is sharing what I learn, either by sites such as SQL Server Central or Stack Overflow, but also writing Articles. Becoming a known name in the SQL Server community is a dream that is a long way away, but I hope that one day I can really share some interesting ideas and resources.
What am I working with?
At the office I work with SQL Server's Data Engine, as well as SSIS and SSRS, however, I have no experience with SSAS, so please don't expect anything about that. At home I work on Linux, with my workstation running Kubuntu 20.04 LTS and my old NUC PC running Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (headerless). Any SQL instances I run at home are running in Containers using LXC (not Docker) and normally these are running Ubuntu 16.04 or Ubuntu 18.04. The majority of speed tests will likely be performed on my Workstation PC, which I'll list some specs of below for your reference:
- Intel i7 8700 (6 cores, 12 threads 3.2Ghz)
- 32Gb DDR4 2666Mhz RAM
- Storage:
- WD Black NVMe M2 500GB SSD
- WD Blue 750GB HDD
- AMD RX580 Blue Sapphire GPU
For tests on my laptop, I'm using a Dell XPS 13, with an Intel i7 1165G7 (4 cores, 8 threads), 16GB of RAM and a 1TB NVMe SSD. This is currently running Windows 10, but I do play on adding a small Kubuntu install on it in the future.
What can I find here?
Like I mentioned earlier, you'll find anything that ends up being my "thought child" here. I'll be covering things like "Why I do things the way I do", but also subjects that have been covered many times before, but I want to do my own spin, or think need a revisit (Speed Test: rCTE vs Tally). There'll also be items that I find interesting but quite short that I want to share (such as how easy updating SQL Server on Linux was).
Dynamic SQL solutions will also be something you'll find here a lot as well, as I experiment with ways to achieve sometimes difficult tasks dynamically. Of course, if you do need a Dynamic SQL solution, that may well mean that you have some design flaws but some of those we have to live with and work around; where as others we should be striving to fix.
How do I contact you?
For now, please use the comment sections on the site. I have enabled comments on this page as well, should you wish to contact me in regards to something that isn't article related.