Last night at our local SQL Server User Group meeting we had the pleasure of Deborah Melkin speaking.  I first met Deborah at our Albany SQL Saturday Event last year. She gave: Back to the Basics: T-SQL 101. Because of the title I couldn’t help but attend. It wasn’t the 101 part by itself that caught my eye. It was the “Back to the Basics”. While geared to beginners, I thought the idea of going back to the basics of something I take for granted was a great idea. She was also a first time speaker, so I’ll admit, I was curious how she would do.

It was well worth my time. While I’d say most of it was review, I was reminded of a thing or two I had forgotten and taught a thing or two.  But also very importantly, she had a great ability to break down the subject into a clearly understandable talk. This is actually harder than many people realize. I’ve heard some brilliant speakers, who simply can’t convey their message, especially on basic items of knowledge, in a way that beginners can understand it.

So, after the talk last summer, I cornered her at the Speaker’s Dinner and insisted she come up with a follow up, a 201 talk if you will. Last night she obliged, with “Beyond the Select”.  What again struck me about it, was other than a great tip in SSMS 17.4 (highlighting a table alias will show you what the base table is), again nothing was really new to me. She talked about UDFs; I’ve attended entire sessions on UDFs. She talked about CTE; I’ve read extensively about them. She discussed windowing functions; we’ve had one of our presenters present on them locally. Similarly with some of the other items she had brought up.

Now, this is NOT a slight at all, but really a compliment. Both as an attendee and as the guy in charge of selecting speakers, it was great to have a broad-reaching topic. Rather than a deep-drive, this was a bit of everything that gave the audience a chance to learn a bit of everything if they hadn’t seen it before (and based on the reactions and feedback I know many learned new stuff) and to compare different methods of doing things.  For example what’s the advantage of a CTE vs. a derived table vs. a temp table.  Well the answer is of course the DBA’s favorite answer, “it depends”.

As a DBA with decades of experience and as an organizer, it’s tempting to have a Bob Ward type talk every month. I enjoyed his talk last month. But, honestly, sometimes we need to go back and review the basics. We’ll probably learn something new or relearn something we had forgotten. And with talks like Deborah’s, we get to see the big picture, which is also very valuable.

So my final thought this week is that in any subject, not only should we be doing the deep dives that extend our knowledge, but we should review our basics. As DBAs, we do a select every day. We take it for granted, but how many people can really tell you clearly the order of operations? Review the basics once in awhile. You may learn something.

And that’s why I selected this topic for this week’s blog.