The Recording
The Panelists
- Kevin Feasel
- Mike Chrestensen
- Mala Mahadevan
Notes: Questions and Topics
A SQL Murder Mystery
Mike started us off with a neat lab to learn how to write SQL, specifically using the SQLite syntax. The story is a murder mystery and you figure out whodunnit based on data in the tables. There’s also a walkthrough if you don’t know where to begin.
This kind of reminds me of the Kusto Detective Agency project, though that one ramps up really fast into complicated solutions rather than staying at a beginner level.
Erik Darling on Stored Procedures
Our primary topic was around a series of blog posts Erik Darling has released. Erik is responsible for maintaining some rather large open-source stored procedures and is a clear writer, so this has been quite interesting to follow. I don’t agree with 100% of what he has to say and talk a bit about some of the disagreements, but these are usually minor quibbles rather than “He’s totally wrong” disagreements.
- ANSI/SET options
- Leaving good comments
- Formatting code
- Error handling
- Debugging
- Batching modifications
- Transactions
- Locking hints
Along the way, Solomon dropped in a link to a DBA Stack Exchange comment he wrote about transactions and XACT_ABORT, and I recommend taking the time to read through that.