I saw Kristen Kinney-Ohlmann speak on SQL at the Twin Cities Code Camp today.

A lot of this was a fairly straightforward talk on mostly T-SQL. She made it fun. She suggested a tool belt in which WHERE was the saw, joins where the screwdriver, GROUP BY the wrench, ORDER BY "the planner" (huh?), and UNION the clamp. I'm not sure I really get her analogy, but... OK. Microsoft apparently made T-SQL in collaboration with Sybase. IBM's Db2 was mentioned some and instead of putting say TOP 100 between SELECT and the star you apparently, after everything else, have to denote that you want to fetch one hundred records only at the end of the query. She spoke to some of the differences in different variations of SQL. Kristen Kinney-Ohlmann mentioned concatenation in T-SQL. As best as I can tell you do it like this:

SELECT CONCAT(First, ' ', Last) As Name
FROM Peeps

 
 

I think this trick has been around since the 2012 version and that before it came you had to just jam stuff together with plus signs. In T-SQL the word OUTER may optionally follow LEFT, RIGHT, and FULL in left, right, and full joins or you may just leave it off. A FULL JOIN gives you everything both a left and right join would give you! A regular JOIN or an INNER JOIN (they do the same thing in T-SQL) are also sometimes thought of as an equal join or an equijoin. The difference between UNION and UNION ALL is that UNION will filter out dupes. Moreover, CROSS APPLY was brought up. It is kinda like subselects and CTEs. This has some examples of its use I guess. Moreover still, try using COUNT(1) instead of COUNT(*) when getting a count in a GROUP BY as the former will just count up by ones while the later will crawl everything and not just the records in question. This was the first of five talks I saw. I'm sure I will offer write-ups on the other four too. The free event, not unlike the long lost Austin Code Camp of yore, was held at Normandale Community College in Bloomington, Minnesota. Below is a Mr. Jason Bock kicking off the event in the keynote. In a lunch outing with a coworker I learned that .scss stands for Sassy Cascading Stylesheet, Kubernetes allows containers to talk to each other, there is a Google Trends API to see what people are searching for and when, and Gravit is an Inkscapesque free vector graphics tool. I mention these here because it was part of this experience and I don't know where else to jam it in.