I got to work with the Apprentice today for just over an hour, and it seemed appropriate for us to go over the Top 10 SQL functions post I put up a few days ago, since he will be using them throughout his career.
We ran several against his registered servers list and went through why you would use them and when. @@Version to verify servers are up to appropriate SP/CU level, @@Servername to verify all of them are online and responding, etc.
We spent quite a bit of time talking about implicit vs. explicit transactions and looking for issues with DBCC Opentran, including writing our own INSERT and leaving it hanging/uncommitted. This took us down a fairly interesting rabbit hole.
I think the most fun he had was when he went off and used Cast, GetDate() and DateDiff to mess around with the sample I gave in the original post to figure out how many days old he is, plus how far back he could go with GetDate() – x. (Jan 1, 1753 as it turns out). When he starts doing things “off-topic” I just sit back and watch 🙂
The second half of the list wasn’t as relevant to him as the first, but then again he’s been doing DBA stuff for total of about a week now.
For each of these we were able to go through at least the basics, which he understood. And he finally bookmarked my blog 😉
This is fun for both of us.
Thanks for reading!
