Spotlight: Wendy Pastrick

I'm reasonably certain that I have a venn diagram of people who follow me on Twitter and people who read my blog: some do one or the other, some do both. So it behooves me from time to time to show Twitter to blog readers, and vice versa. It helps you too, to meet some of the coolest folk in the industry, and see what they're up to.

Today I'm inspired to introduce you to one of my Twitter Tweeps, Chicago native Wendy Pastrick (Wendy_Dance on Twitter).  I met Wendy at SQL PASS 2009 this past November – my clearest memory is of her onstage moderating the Women in Technology Luncheon panel – but most of my interaction with her has been via Twitter.  Today, in face, she made me smile: "my plan today: shut up. document document document. Do what I'm told. Wait for the fallout. Pull out my documentation."  Sounds familiar.

Wendy started her DBA career like many of us do – the DBA quit, and her manager volunteered her as the replacement. Wendy is a volunteer on the PASS Ambassador Team – which means she gets to wear the super flattering red vest at PASS events – and a Faculty Member at Jorge Segarra's SQL University.  Her bio tells us that she's a dance instructor (a careful internet search will reveal that the dance is not ballet). I'm thinking SQLPASS 2010 dance classes, but I haven't mentioned it to her yet…I'm still giggling over the mental image of a large number of middleaged male SQL dbas learning to belly dance…

I wanted to keep this brief, so let's finish things off with a flourish of links:

Respec', Wendy, and thanks for all that you do…

-Jennifer McCown

http://www.MidnightDBA.com

 

Get Index Included Column Info

Content rating: Beginner, tip

One of my pet peeves with SQL is that there isn't a quick and easy way to get all the information about indexes. Sure, you have sp_help tablename or sp_helpindex tablename to get the index name and keys for a table, but that's not even half the story.  I use a lot of indexes with INCLUDE – more on that in the next blog – and INCLUDEd columns don't show up in sp_help and sp_helpindex.

To get around this, you can keep this query on hand, or just turn it into a view:

SELECT OBJECT_NAME(i.[object_id]) TableName ,

i.[name] IndexName ,

c.[name] ColumnName ,

ic.is_included_column ,

i.index_id ,

i.type_desc ,

i.is_unique ,

i.data_space_id ,

i.ignore_dup_key ,

i.is_primary_key ,

i.is_unique_constraint

FROM sys.indexes i

JOIN sys.index_columns ic ON ic.object_id = i.object_id

AND i.index_id = ic.index_id

JOIN sys.columns c ON ic.object_id = c.object_id

AND ic.column_id = c.column_id

ORDER BY tableName ,

ic.index_id ,

ic.index_column_id

That'll give you a lovely bit of information: the table, index, and column names, along with all your day to day index info needs.  Slap a WHERE i.[name] = 'indexname' in there, and you get information for a particular index.

Jen McCown

http://www.MidnightDBA.com

Contest: Best TShirt Slogan Wins a Book!

Please note: Comments are on a delay (I've had to turn on comment moderation); once you submit, your comment won't appear right away.

We liked giving away William R. Stanek's (@williamstanek on Twitter) book "Windows 7: The Definitive Guide, 1st Edition" so much, we're going to do it again.  Here are the contest rules:

  1. Post your best MidnightDBA tshirt slogan idea in the comments below before January 1, 2010.
  2. We'll pick the one we like best, and give the submitter the Windows 7 book.
  3. And we'll put the slogan on a MidnightDBA tshirt.

We're picking, not drawing, so this is extremely subjective.  No rules on language or whatever, but I will give you some guidelines:

  • We're not likely to put profanity on a shirt. It just wouldn't sell.
  • We're unlikely to pick something we've already put on a shirt. That includes slogans matching the existing Buck Woody "Write down 'everyone'" shirt.
  • We're most likely to pick something funny and/or full of WIN.
  • We're most likely going to pick something industry related. Sure, Tiger Woods jokes may be funny (not usually), but they don't really scream "MidnightDBA".

And yeah, I know it makes more sense to give you the tshirt….but we're not gonna, because we have the book. The book will make you smarter than the shirt. And we just want what's best for you, because we love you. 

Let's totally have some fun with this…

-Jen McCown

http://www.midnightdba.com/