The Viking DBA - Making Strong Bodies and Databases

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...

  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...

  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...

  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...

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...

  Pet Peeves - Part 2 - In the Database Last week I rattled off my top 5 biggest Pet Peeves when it comes to working out in the gym. If you missed it, give it a read here . Today though, being the Viking DBA, we're taking a dip into a short list of my biggest pet peeves when it comes to working with databases. It was difficult narrowing this list down to just five, I didn't want to prattle on incessantly. There's so many more I could've done. If you don't have a background in the database realm, I'll do my best to make it relatable. Ready? Here we go in no particular order. SELECT * FROM tablename - Let's get this elephant right out of the way. We as DBAs all do this. Admit it to yourself. You need to get a quick sampling of the data from a table to see what's there; what kind of data you might be working with, column names, values and so on. Often times, it's just to pull a reference list of codes or keys for other tables you need to scan through la...