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Supplements and SQL Hints - Part 2 - Pre Workouts

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Welcome to Part 2 of my month of September Special: Supplements and SQL Hints. We all might need a little boost now and then. Be it in the gym or in our SQL Servers. Therefore I am assembling this month long series, flipping back and forth between topics. This week I'm touching on those boosters that help get you going in the gym, the kickstart, the extra fuel booster that will ramp up your workout! I am going to declare at the outset, I am no doctor nor a licensed dietician. I am simply going to list out some of the pre workout supplements I have taken in the past or currently, how they work for me what they do and so forth. These paragraphs should not be taken as direction but rather simply as advice and personal experience. Before you begin ANY sort of dietary supplement, consult your family physician. Stim vs Non Stim What I refer to here is Stimulants. Ingredients such as caffeine, taurine and guarana. You might have seen these names on your favorite gas station energy drink. ...
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Supplements and SQL Hints - Part 1 - TSQL Helpers

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  Let's face it, every now and then we need some help. A little boost to get over the finish line. Whether that be in the gym or in your daily life as a database administrator. Hence I am putting together a little mini series: Supplements and SQL Hints! Both are little helpers that can assist in crossing the finish line of a goal or simply improving overall performance. Honestly, when I first conceived of The Viking DBA Blog, this was I believe the second topic I jotted down to write about. Just never got around to it. But we're here now so let's dive in. The series is going to span the month of September, each week addressing a new topic under this banner. Week 1 - Query Hints. Using boosters that affect the overall execution plan of the script. Week 2 - Pre-workout supplements and energy boosters Week 3 - Table Hints. These are elements you can apply at a single table level Week 4 - Post workout supplements and muscle builders Week 5 - Join Hints. You guessed, how to...
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Motivation Monday Mini Blog - 8/31/2026

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Welcome to Motivation Monday! 8/31/2026 Today is the last day of August. School is back in session, neighborhood pools are winding down and unless you live in the south, temperatures are starting to dip (still hit a triple digit in Texas yesterday). The summer is coming to a close and I'm curious; did you complete everything you set out to do? Be it from last week, the last month or the summer as a whole? The grind doesn't stop simply because the calendar shifts. Each day is a new opportunity to be just a little bit better. Hit one more rep in the gym, complete one more task at work, spend one more hour with the family. One percent more is still increasing. I feel we get so caught up in the amounts that when little increments occur we downplay the progress. "I'm not there yet" or "Yes but I can do more." That might be true and future you can strive for that. So maybe you didn't hit the mark on all you set out to concur this summer. As it turns out, t...
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Running Out of INT

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  Has this every happened to you? Your legacy application database is humming along nicely, query requests happen with little to no blocking, users are happy with performance, nary an issue in sight. Then out of nowhere new records are failing to be inserted! Your once happy database has been brought to a screeching halt. Why is that? Oh no, you've got a table with an INT datatype. What's worse is it's the primary key! And it's your orders table!! Extreme example? Perhaps, but willing to bet it happens. The Problem Let's take a moment here just in case someone reading is unfamiliar. In many systems I've worked with, a table will have a Primary Key that is an INT (integer) data type. Most frequently an ID field. Not something you'd necessarily query for or put into a report, but it's a means of identifying a record and helping to speed up searches, an effective column to join other tables on, perhaps a foreign key here and there too. Ninety Nine percent o...
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Motivation Monday Mini Blog - 8/24/26

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  Good morning and happy Monday! Going to try a new little mini blog series simply titled "Motivation Monday". Typically we say something like "I'll start Monday" or "Monday is a good starting point."  What makes Mondays so special? Technically speaking, Sunday is the start of the week. Look at most Gregorian calendars and Sunday is first day of a week. But since by and large most people are off work, it's still considered the weekend. I digress. I started thinking about this a few weeks back. We are just assailed daily with negativity and division. Social Media, once began as a tool to help friends and family stay connected has devolved into a battleground for hatred and dislike. Unless you're watching a bunch of cat videos. Who can hate on cute cat videos? (That is NOT a challenge by the way). So rather than continuing to sow seeds of dissent, how about we as a gym and tech community find ways to lift each other up? Motivation Monday! I'm...
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How I Am Using AI

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  The hottest buzzword of the last 5 or so years, Artificial Intelligence, AI. There is simply no escaping it, AI permeates nearly every facet of our daily lives. While maybe you're not using a fancy tool such as Claude, ChatGPT or Gemini, chances are if you've got a smartphone you're using some aspect of it and maybe don't even realize it. Siri on the iPhone is truly a personal digital assistant. "Hey Siri, set a reminder for me to do XYZ task later." Autocomplete and grammar suggestions happily assist in crafting that document or email. Even within SSMS, the tool used to manage SQL Server is wading into the AI waters with some of their new features in version 22.  This Old Curmudgeon I feel that I am in a strange point in my life and career. The Internet was just starting to get its foundation when I was a junior in high school. In the time when youths begin thinking about and laying out potential career goal, this new fangled technology is going to revoluti...
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Do Not Be Afraid To Learn

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I had been wrestling with what to write about this week. I'll be up front and honest (and may have even said this in an early post), I am not going to be breaking new technical ground in this blog. I consider myself to be intelligent enough to do good work and I can explain myself well to sufficiently make a case for or against doing something either in the gym or the database space. However, I am not necessarily writing to demonstrate some sort of new technique or function that's bleeding edge. My hope is that you find something interesting, entertaining, and educational enough that enables you to take a step back an revisit basics that help you get over a particularly troublesome query or break past a Personal Record (PR) in the gym. With that in mind, I blindly stumbled into today's topic: Don't Be Afraid to Learn. I would venture to say that most of us are not averse to learning. In my line of work if you're not attempting to learn something new every day, you w...
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