Database Normalization in SQL with Examples (2020-02-18)

 SQLServerCentral Newsletter for February 18, 2020 Problems displaying this newsletter? [View online](. [SQL Server Central]( Featured Contents - [Database Normalization in SQL with Examples]( - [Record responses for the State of Database DevOps report]( - [General Purpose Tier for Azure SQL Database]( - [From the SQL Server Central Blogs - Be Kind]( - [From the SQL Server Central Blogs - Configure your tools : T-SQL Tuesday #123]( Question of the Day - [SELECT and Locking]( [Redgate University]( The Voice of the DBA  Leveling up Core Skills: A Pattern for Launching an Internal Training Initiative Today we have a guest editorial from Julia Hayward as Steve is away on his sabbatical. In a world of constant technical change, it is critical for organizations to help team members advance their core skills. With this in mind, Redgate’s Lead Software Engineers (LSEs) have begun an internal Engineering Academy as one of several initiatives to level up core skills used by engineers in their day-to-day jobs. The LSEs chose [Git]( as a topic for our first training session. Git has become the dominant tool for version control in recent years and is used by all our development teams. We felt that Git is an integral part of the day-to-day toolset of an engineer here at Redgate, and that having a good understanding of how to use it is vital to using it effectively. To launch the first course, the team organized it in the following lightweight manner: - Put out a call for attendees on Slack - Created a brief questionnaire so that attendees could self-evaluate and baseline their skills with Git against five different pieces of criteria - Collated useful exercises and resources from existing material relevant to the goals of the workshop - Found a volunteer who is quite knowledgeable about Git to lead the session The training session itself was a two-hour session of intense practice held in a meeting room. We challenged each attendee to commit to using Git on the command line exclusively for the next two weeks following the session. Some attendees even uninstalled their UI tools during the session! We also created a Slack channel for the group to share tips and to ask for help. Feedback from the attendees on the day was very positive, with all of them saying that they'd learned something new. Two weeks after the session, we asked attendees to self-evaluate again to see if they felt they had improved. The majority rated themselves at least one point higher, even though the categories were quite broad, and the average rating moved up more than a whole point. We also asked attendees for their feedback. Everyone still felt enthusiastic about having done the training and would recommend it to others. Some were very positive about their new skills; some found giving up some features of their favorite GUI annoying, at least at first, but no one found serious difficulty. One very interesting observation was that using the command line tends to push you towards doing smaller pieces of work in each commit; it can only be a positive thing when good practice is reinforced by a relatively frictionless experience! After this first experience, we plan to continue and grow our Engineering Academy within Redgate. If you are looking for a lightweight pattern with which to launch a similar effort for your own teams, we found this approach gave us a promising start at Redgate. Julia Hayward [Join the debate, and respond to today's editorial on the forums]( [Redgate SQL Provision](   Featured Contents [Database Normalization in SQL with Examples]( Gouri Shankar from SQLServerCentral Gouri Shankar provides an overview of normalizing a database. [Record responses for the State of Database DevOps report]( Additional Articles from Redgate The fourth annual State of Database DevOps report is now available for download. Kendra Little announces the launch in her latest blog. Check out the first high level findings of the report here. [General Purpose Tier for Azure SQL Database]( Additional Articles from MSSQLTips.com Five years ago, there were a limited number of ways to deploy and use the SQL Server engine in the Azure Cloud. Today, there are many different services available. From the SQL Server Central Blogs - [Be Kind]( Grant Fritchey from The Scary DBA Simply put, we are not always going to agree. Please, take this as someone who was nicknamed “The Scary DBA” for reasons comic and tragic. I’ve screwed up a... From the SQL Server Central Blogs - [Configure your tools : T-SQL Tuesday #123]( Kenneth.Fisher from SQLStudies Happy T-SQL Tuesday! Thanks for hosting this month Jess Pomfret (blog|twitter) and great topic. Life Hacks. There is one thing ... Continue reading   Question of the Day Today's question (by Kendra Little):  SELECT and Locking For a SELECT query running under the default “pessimistic” implementation of the read committed isolation level, locks are held.... Think you know the answer? [Click here]( and find out if you are right.    Yesterday's Question of the Day (by Kendra Little) DBCC Meaning What does "DBCC", as in (DBCC SHOW_STATISTICS) stand for? (Pick the answer defined in the current Microsoft documentation on DBCC) Answer: Database Console Commands Explanation: I used DBCC commands for years before ever knowing what the acronym meant! According to the Microsoft documentation, DBCC stands for [Database Console Commands]( I suppose they’ve been around for so long that they used to be run from an administrator using a terminal, aka console.  [Discuss this question and answer on the forums](    Database Pros Who Need Your Help Here's a few of the new posts today on the forums. To see more, [visit the forums](. --------------------------------------------------------------- SQL Server 2017 - Development [Recursive CTE vs UNION ALL in a VIEW]( - Hi, I'm trying to improve a VIEW which is made of several UNION ALLs, something like this: SELECT 0 as OPNR, nivdop1.nr as DOPNR, 0 as ANTL, (nivdop1.ANT) / sumniv1.SUMANT as ANT, 0 as ANTS, nivdop1.SVIND, nivrv1.nr as RVNR, nivrv1.NAVN as RVNAVN, nivrv1.TYPE, 1 as NIVEAU, 0 as PARENT, nivdop1.LINE, 0 as PLINE from DBDOPSK […] [How to preserve leading zeros with insert into]( -      Below is the create table script and the insert into statement. Both work fine in SSMS. However, the insert into drops my leading zeros. These are important because I have a query that I want to test out that clearly specifics certain character counts and values. I am hoping to […] [FUN only, solving a Puzzle.]( - /* For FUN. I like puzzles, I like T-SQL coding, I like to show off :-), so why not combine these. This project was for FUN only, but I did learn new things. Goal: Build a Sudoku solver with the minimum amount of script. (Minimum number of lines or characters). It does have to solve […] SQL Server 2016 - Administration [Update Statistics is causing DB file to grow in always on envrionment]( - Hello! When I check what is causing DB files (.mdf) to grow, it is showing as Update Statistics. DB files are auto-growing by 1 GB. In about a month, it has grown by more than 10 GB. Could you please let me know the reason and how to prevent it from this?  Thanks in […] [Looking for recommendation on "cost threshold value"]( - H All, What is the recommended value for setting sp_configure setting "Cost Threshold For Parallelism" for an OLTP workload instead of default value 5? Regards, Sam SQL Server 2016 - Development and T-SQL [Workaround for executing dynamic sql in function]( - I'm trying to create a view which dynamically generates text from input parameters. But executing dynamic sql or stored procedure is not allowed in functions. Is there a work around for this? Below is sample script for: 1. Create tables, 2.Create function, 3.Create view, 4. Expected output ----------------TABLES------------------------- IF OBJECT_ID('dbo.emp_info', 'U') IS NOT NULL DROP […] [SQL server change table query not working as expected]( - Hi, It looks like that a CHANGETABLE query for a particular table is not working correctly. I created a record in the bill_details table and then updated it. The record was created with sys_change_version=5000. The records was updated with sys_change_version=5001. But the following CHANGETABLE queries are confusing me and apparently returning incorrect sys_change_creation_version: select * […] Administration - SQL Server 2014 [Trying to determin how much space I have a left on my server]( - Hi, The issue, I inherited, is that I have a 2012 SQL Server installation siting on a Win 10 machine; not sure if that matters. The C drive 93.6 GB free, and I can find how much space is allocated on each of my databases. I know there is a lot to look at such […] SQL 2012 - General [tempdb shrinking]( - Hi, Need some quick help here. I am unable to shrink tempdb files. There is lot of available free space. DBCC loginfo output We have an alert and incident opened for this and we have to close it. Other thing is that systems/storage team is not going to give us more space.  There are […] [Convert column values into single row comma separator]( - Team My requirement is to convert column values into single row comma separator along with single quotes. Pls help ServerName > Column Name Values in a row like below Server1 server2 server3 server44 I need a result like 'Server1,server2,server3,server44' SQL Server 2019 - Development [Query to fetch quarter & year from date]( - Hi, I am having the following query to fetch day & year of a particular date. Need to fetch Quarter & Year also. I tried in a similar fashion. But its not working. Please help on this. DECLARE @minDate_Str NVARCHAR(30) = '01/01/2020' , @maxDate_Str NVARCHAR(30) = '31/12/2020' DECLARE @minDate DATETIME, @maxDate DATETIME SET @minDate = […] [Running VBS Script through SQL Agent Job]( - Hello All, Glad to have found this board. I have a VB Script that is exporting a query to an excel file. It works perfectly when I run it from the command line. When I create a SQL Server Agent Job to execute the same script, it fails. The type is 'Operating System (CmdExec)' and […] T-SQL (SS2K8) [How to extract the right country info from the field?]( - This is very painful to me, I have a list of location and need to determine as much/close as possible(no need to be 100% accurate) for its country info, sample as below and two files attached here: one has 100 records, the other is the full list. San Diego, CA, United States Chicago, IL, United […] Reporting Services [SSRS report rows not summing correctly]( - Hi, I have produced a report in report builder. During the month the report runs ok, however when the report crosses into a new month e.g. January to February, it seems to split on the number of referrals whereas it should be a total number. Within my SQL code it shows the split with the […] General [SELECT different rows on multiple threads]( - I have an application which will be reading from a single table, in order to speed up the processing of each row it will run multiple threads, as soon as each thread finishes it will read again from the same table. My first approach is to select the rows assigned to an index of each […]   [RSS Feed]( This email has been sent to {EMAIL}. To be removed from this list, please click [here](. If you have any problems leaving the list, please contact the webmaster@sqlservercentral.com. 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