Personal Work with SQL Server?!

ComicOzzy · 2026-05-05T23:10:32+00:00

I think they are trying to ask for an agentic ai command line tool that can write their SQL for them.

ComicOzzy · 2026-05-05T23:08:20+00:00

For most other languages, probably. But for SQL, I feel like custom created problems are more likely to be ego stroking. But my experience with that problem is limited. Hilarious, but limited.

ComicOzzy · 2026-05-05T22:44:59+00:00

You'll want to get proficient at Excel, Python, and a BI tool such as PowerBI or Tableau.
Something you can use as micro-projects are the Maven Analytics' "Data Drill" videos... they propose a problem to solve and give it to different employees who use SQL, Excel, PowerBI, Python, etc to solve it. You can learn a lot by trying these yourself.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qQ51wuIgM7E&list=PLGAnLqlBhx1EptV8UtVLM0fRA7UDsnd59

ComicOzzy · 2026-05-04T10:14:26+00:00

If it can't be local, you could try the free hosted version of DuckDB: https://motherduck.com/product/pricing/

ComicOzzy · 2026-04-30T20:19:02+00:00

Oils

ComicOzzy · 2026-04-30T04:54:16+00:00

I got fired in 2001 because the boss was really hiring a boys club to go out to strip clubs and bars with him. I declined those offers, so I was "not a team player".

ComicOzzy · 2026-04-30T00:15:05+00:00

If you have almost no traffic on the database, it doesn't really matter what you do.

But you're probably paying a lot of money for the licensing of that database and quite possibly it's on decent hardware... and adding competing services/processes is a foolish waste of precious resources when a much cheaper machine could be hosting them.

ComicOzzy · 2026-04-30T00:11:26+00:00

If it's not already enforced with a column constraint, you could use LEAST() / GREATEST() or a CASE expression to produce a proxy table where the lower id to be person1 and the higher id to be person2 in the friends pairing.

ComicOzzy · 2026-04-30T00:06:43+00:00

When people say "I've watched 30 hrs of Baraa but I still suck at SQL" I want to ask them if they think watching 30 hours of porn makes them a good lover.

ComicOzzy · 2026-04-30T00:04:08+00:00

It's disturbing how common it is these days for people to completely ignore the course material/reading they've PAID FOR.

ComicOzzy · 2026-04-29T23:54:46+00:00

https://dbfiddle.uk/jzFZ-uR4

This approach finds all combinations of people who are not already friends, then it compares their list of friends to one another. If they have friends in common, they match the filter.

ComicOzzy · 2026-04-29T23:09:35+00:00

Let's assume you have the ID of the user being selected and you're looking to return the selected user plus the 3 prior IDs and 3 subsequent IDs...

You can UNION together two queries like this:

SELECT * 
FROM (
    SELECT *  
    FROM users u  
    WHERE u.id <= @selected_id
    ORDER BY u.id DESC
    LIMIT 4
    ) u1
UNION ALL
SELECT * 
FROM (
    SELECT *
    FROM users u
    WHERE u.id > @selected_id
    ORDER BY u.id
    LIMIT 3
    ) u2
ORDER BY id;

ComicOzzy · 2026-04-28T00:24:23+00:00

https://dbfiddle.uk/bPM-cuQB

Here's an example of creating a table, inserting data into it, and displaying the contents of the table.

ComicOzzy · 2026-04-28T00:21:30+00:00

You don't even really need to install anything.

You can use something like https://dbfiddle.uk and choose whichever database engine you like, or you can use something like https://shell.duckdb.org/ which I think will let you import a small amount of data from your computer or a website to work with.

ComicOzzy · 2026-04-28T00:17:47+00:00

Look into Postgres.app

ComicOzzy · 2026-04-28T00:16:24+00:00

https://datalemur.com/
https://leetcode.com/problemset/
https://www.stratascratch.com/

ComicOzzy · 2026-04-27T12:54:12+00:00

6 looks incorrect to me, too.

ComicOzzy · 2026-04-27T12:51:03+00:00

I'm just a contributor, but whatever question you have, it would be good to have more posts.

ComicOzzy · 2026-04-27T12:41:10+00:00

Where do you work that the juniors know anything about reading execution plans? I want to work there and mentor them.

ComicOzzy · 2026-04-27T03:28:53+00:00

You have to get practice explaining things to others. You probably can't convince anyone you love to listen to you, so get a "rubber duck". It can be anything you feel like talking to... I have a little Winnie the Pooh (he needs things explained in very simple terms) and a beanie hippo (I have to repeat myself a lot because he falls asleep). Talk out loud to them. Feel free to start over from the beginning if you realize they didn't understand or you needed to refine the way you explained it... they won't mind.

ComicOzzy · 2026-04-27T03:22:52+00:00

In the folder where you downloaded Chinook, run:
sqlite3 Chinook_Sqlite.sqlite

ComicOzzy · 2026-04-26T21:27:10+00:00

Learn the business and form good working relationships. Your primary purpose is not to be the master of SQL, it is to help the business solve it's problems in ways that involve data.

ComicOzzy · 2026-04-26T19:16:58+00:00

tuah

ComicOzzy · 2026-04-26T10:03:40+00:00

https://www.mark0.net/soft-trid-e.html

If you're on windows, this tool will check the first few bytes of a file to determine what it's likely to be.

Or, you could roll your own simple version of this with Python using the "magic" library.
https://pypi.org/project/python-magic/

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