Yep, I do the same. Depending on size of data being affected, level of table RI in place,and necessity of seeing the data again later, or client calling back the following day/week having changed their mind and can we 'undo' that, I will often tack in a select into tablename_changes_jan7_2020 or some such convention to grab the unchanged records. Qty, backup retention options etc also play into this so use some common sense of course. If you worry about space, just set an drop table job up to clear it after a month or whatever.
Lots of these CYA tricks if you want to make sure you don't shoot yourself in the foot.
Agree. Its far more valuable to see how a candidate approaches problems than some memorized recital show. I don't expect perfection, but if their reasoning is sound that becomes clear fairly quickly. I usually also include some imperfect questions purposely to see how they handle that. While we wish client projects were nice and clean with orderly data and tight requirements, the truth is that is rarely the case. It's useful to see how the candidate responds to those types of things. I had one gentleman argue with me about one of those questions claiming you would never see primary and foreign keys between tables not perectly match in the real world. Well when you are matching data from entirely disparate systems, you typically do. Anyway I digress.
Adam Hall's Quiller series. Good to revisit every few years and the mechanism of building to a crisis, then starting after the resolution and backing up is fun. Not for everyone though as it's cold war vintage spy stuff. Feels real though, not like Hollywood versin of Bond.
Banks of course, Use of Weapons is great.
Just hit 51 and finally reading Dune now, so keep that in mind, but would also suggest Cryptonomicon as i have started it several times, put it down and then come back and had to start again several times.... but i find it interesting enough to keep trying!
100% this. Nothing is more aggravating than having to go through someone elses SQL mess and having to reformat with commas in front. Why you ask? First, its trivial to comment a value out for testing/debugging etc, but secondly if you don't and you are reading through a large query, it is far more difficult to scan to see what fields are included, being aliased, incorporated into calculations or functions etc.
This ties to the longer code, less clever mantra noted prior in the thread.
The else comment I get, but I still use it and typically set it to a code or value that will push the error further up the stream.
We do a lot of system to system integration so often the else part is arising from missing setup info from the source or destination so surfacing it later can ( depends on use case of course) sometimes make it easier for end users to self fix the problem by updating one of said source or destination systems.
If you do a lot of adhoc sql with an editer that supports multiline editing, it allows for pasting in big lists of text and quickly formatting it, trailing commas and ragged edge right data suck to edit in bulk.
^ This. Most folks these days need something short and to the point. If you want exhaustive detail, read the official documentation. If however you want something to point you in the right direction to get going with a couple of representative examples, then this style of presentation is great. If you subsequently need further detail, then you can search that out yourself. And let's be honest, searching for more is half the fun anyway ;-)
We tried it at work, I wanted to like it but it was often slow, some features only sort of work due to the way they are integrated with office 365 and lastly, too much conversation emphasis. Now, at our workplace, for dev related items, basically 'I'm the guy'. I have been in IT for ~ 30 years and try to keep up on most areas. That being said, I have to say I really don't find the conversation thread communication style all that helpful on technical projects. So, teams, slack etc don't seem as handy to me as perhaps others find them. Getting back to teams, one of the primary failings was that the schedule and tasks integration looks ok on the surface, but once you try to use it you quickly run into serious roadblocks. Can't combine project schedules into a global view. Navigation of multiple lanes is tedious as every lane scrolls independantly and the scroll bars helpfully disappear on you etc etc. I filed numerous helpful suggestions but never saw much progress on things that seemed basic requirements. In the end we have put it aside and are using other tools now. Maybe your mileage will be better though.
