New Index option disabled
I’ll make this short and sweet. I was trying to create an index on a new table I had created through SQL Management Studio 2005. I right clicked the Index folder under the table and noticed that the option of New Index was grayed out (disabled). I figured out that Management Studio will disable that option if you have the table schema-locked in another window. Close any of those windows, and try again – it should be enabled again.
2011 Goals
Goodbye 2010, hello 2011. 2010 brought the launch of this blog and my decision to start doing freelance work. I decided to start learning new programming languages to widen my talent. At the end of 2010, where do I stand? Well clearly this blog is still running. I know some Django (Python’s web framework), and some Ruby on Rails. Unfortunately, I have yet to start freelance work. Well with a new year comes new goals.
2011 Goals
Start freelance work
Last year, I decided to start doing freelance work. In addition to the extra income, I wanted to do work on the side to give me opportunities to use new technologies that I do not normally use during my day job (asp.net). With the current economy starting a new business is not that easy. How does one market themselves, letting potential customers know that I exist? Do I use old-fashion means – ads in newspapers, flyers, or is the internet the answer? A business focused site may be the answer for that. I created this blog to be a place where I could share both my personal thoughts AND professional thoughts on technologies, etc. I think perhaps I may need to create a site to focus more on my freelance services.
Be more physically fit and active
It wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world if I lost about 15-20 lbs. I am tall and have a slender build, but certain part of my body (waist) tend to bulge. I lost some weight before my wedding in 2008, but have since put it back on. I want to lose the weight by the summer (nothing is happening in the summer, just a random selection).
Be more organized
I always try to be organized, but I will admit there are times where I run around like a chicken with my head cut off looking for something. I want to improve on that (the organization, not my headless chicken impersonation).
Be more assertive and get what I want when I want it
I just feel that sometimes I get bullied into things I don’t want. I am not an aggressive person, so I feel like people walk all over me at times. With out getting into specific details that will make this post sound like a hate-filled rant, let me just say that I want to be more assertive.
So those are my goals for this year. Will I succeed in all of them, or will I fail? I am going to try to update my progress for each of these goals each and every month.
Numeric padding in T-SQL
I was recently trying to find a way to padding a number in T-SQL and decided to share what I found. Let us say I wanted to pad the number 123 into the string ’00123′, here is how to do it.
SELECT REPLACE(STR(123, 5), ' ', '0') FROM SomeTable
I found this little bit of useful information here at FoxTricks.
