Sherpa of Data

Author: Kevin

  • Common Table Expressions Can Be A Good Thing

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    Kevin
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    Most of our coding these days has Common Table Expressions, also known as CTEs. If not, you’re either working on an older version of SQL Server or you haven’t been introduced to this piece of goodness. CTEs can make reading SQL queries a lot easier if the logic is convoluted. For example, let’s use the…

  • That’s Just NOT Right

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    Today, I want to talk about the keyword NOT in SQL Server. It can be your friend or your worst enemy depending upon how you use it. Let’s delve into some examples of what I’m talking about and how it’s easy for people to mess it up. Let’s say we have a table named DataTable.…

  • Basic Analysis of Data with Snowflake

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    Now and again, you’ll be asked to do some basic analysis of your data in Snowflake. Now by “basic analysis,” I mean for each column tell how many rows are populated, what’s the largest and smallest value in the column, etc… Some of you will want to review each and every column of every table…

  • Scrutinizing the Data in All of our tables

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    Today, I was working with SQL Server to get row counts from several tables so I thought I’d be smart and work with some functions in SQL Server to make it smarter / easier. Now, if I am truly only getting “straight” row counts from these tables, I would be able to create a query…

  • Removing Objects Is Not So Simple

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    When you’re working between SQL Server and Snowflake, there can be a lot of crossover that may make you forget what system you’re working in. Sometimes it’s close, but not close enough. Today, let’s go over something that should be rather simple – removing old objects that we shouldn’t need any longer. In SQL Server,…

  • Walking Through Advent of Code Day 9 Part 2

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    Welcome back after a long, much-needed break! Hopefully, you’ve had time to reenergize and are now ready to start 2024 with a bang! Thankfully, the elves were semi-nice to us for part 2 and only slightly changed their requests and wanted us to find the first number in the solution instead of the last. If…

  • Walking Through Advent of Code Day 9

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    And so day 9 begins. Today, our elves are working hard on having us come up with the next number in a sequence. Thankfully, they do give us a few good examples to walk through on how they would like us to do it. And with that, it’s off to the races! As always, we…

  • Walking Through Advent of Code Day 8 Part 2

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    With Day 8 part 1 being all about traversing tables, I’m sure our little friends the elves will find a new way to make this harder for us. First, we find out that we’re now starting with multiple positions – anything that ends with an A – and finishing anywhere that ends in a Z.…

  • Walking Through Advent Of Code Day 8

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    Day 8 is gonna be fun-filled and exciting I can tell it from here! To make life a little simpler for all of us, I used a variable that I just pasted my instructions into. In my case, I called it @FollowThis allowing it to be up to 300 characters in length. Hopefully, no one’s…

  • Walking Through Advent of Code Day 7 Part 2

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    So, we got tired of playing Camel Cards and decided to throw some Jokers into the mix. This time, our wonderful friends the elves have decided that they don’t like Jacks but they do like Jokers. So, there are a few changes to our code that will need to be made: For our wonderful #Hands…