— I awoke from a dream this morning muttering,
— "Well, I better to get to work
— on that data warehouse."
—
— The dream was one of those SQL coding dreams I used
— to have a lot, when I was working as an SQL coder.
— Screens filled with half-written SQL queries written
— against the infamous ARAMARK datawarehouse (or my
— surreptitious 2 terabyte copy of it that was running
— on the "National Accounts Stealth Server" that I'd
— constructed under my desk), in which I'd denormalized
— the database to speed up pivot table queries of
— various kinds. Dreams filled with feelings of anxiety
— and urgency and frustration. I almost never have
— those dreams, anymore – I haven't done a single
— line of programming in almost 5 years, now. I'm a
— happier and more balanced person, because of
— it (though not perfect, oh no, I know).
—
— But sometimes dreams do weird things, and this
— early dawn, as my cold medicine wore off (I'm combatting
— an unpleasant flu currently), I was plunged
— into a vivid relapse of my database-hacking days. And I
— awoke with a sense that I was behind on some ill-defined
— but very important project, some report due
— that day and the queries were running too slow, some
— effort to find some ineluctable fragment of
— information or some anomalous, dangerous data point
— that the sales people insisted shouldn't exist and
— would embarrass us in front of the customer, but
— lo and behold, there it was glaring up from the
— spreadsheet.
—
— I made some of my Brazilian instant coffee, and
— ate toast and an apple for breakfast.
—
— Below is a dummy query from a SQL educational
— website. Just to give a flavor or my dreaming.
DECLARE @PivotColumnHeaders VARCHAR(MAX)
SELECT @PivotColumnHeaders =
COALESCE(
@PivotColumnHeaders + ',[' + [MonthName] + ']',
'[' + [MonthName] + ']'
)
FROM dummy.dbo.ListMonthNames()
ORDER BY monthid
DECLARE @PivotTableSQL NVARCHAR(MAX)
SET @PivotTableSQL = N'
SELECT *
FROM (
SELECT
YEAR(OrderDate) [Year],
DATENAME(MONTH, OrderDate) as [Month],
SubTotal
FROM Sales.SalesOrderHeader
) TableDate
PIVOT (
SUM(SubTotal)
FOR [Month] IN (
' + @PivotColumnHeaders + '
)
) PivotTable
'
EXECUTE(@PivotTableSQL)
— What I'm listening to, right now.
— Kray Van Kirk, "You to me." There's no youtube or other
— online video for this song. So… find your own copy – his
— music is free from his website (I wonder… I should make my
— own youtube. I wonder if he would object?