Data Community Fun: A visit with Paul Turley

 

A few weeks ago, Paul Turley, his wife Shirley, their two spunky dogs and anti-social cat pulled up at the "Letourneau Resort" for a 3-day visit. We spent some time working together on the patio while his dogs raced around my property. The cat hid in the Data Bus and only went out when forced to do so. We shared several meals and spent many hours working at our computers (he visited Thursday, Friday, & Saturday. We both had to work Thursday & Friday). 

"Fancy" patio set-up. Just the computer, but we do have internet out there and the weather was perfect for sitting outside enjoying the fresh air while also getting a lot of work done. 

View from patio when you look up from computer. :) 

On the last day, Saturday, my boss at 3 Cloud, Kathi Vick, and her husband joined us. Paul has a blog called "Data On The Road", so he interviewed both of us before getting back on the road heading eastward. 

Guy loaned Paul his "Director's clapper" - it was the award from the Sakuracon 2005 AMV competition and was signed by a bunch of the convention guests - for the filming. The interviews took place on my patio couch. The clapper was definitely a fun way to start the videos.

I got to put the "Arizona" sticker on their "Places We've Been" map attached to the side of the Data Bus.

In early 2020, Paul and I had planned on being co-presenters at the Phoenix SQL Saturday, so I made cloud shirts for both of us so we'd match. Unfortunately, COVID came along and the Phoenix SQL Saturday never happened. 

For the interview with me, Paul and I donned our matching shirts to demonstrate how cool it would have been if we had presented with matching cloud shirts. They look pretty spiffy, eh? And the cloud earrings are of course a necessary accessory for any cloud data professional!

The above is a screenshot of the video posted to Paul's blog. I recommend you go see the video on his page, and also check out the other interviews he did with a number of other wonderful people in the data community. He also has a schedule posted telling you where he'll be and when. If he's coming to your area, reach out to him and say, "hi". 
 

I can't wait to see the Data Bus again when it next passes through the Phoenix area. 

SQL Editor “Presentation View”

I’ve often been frustrated by the lack of real estate in the standard SQL query window. Once the query has been run, the results eat up half of the screen, and if you have multiple grid view results from multiple queries in a batch, it can be difficult to examine all of the data without fighting with the UI to let you move the dividing line up.
Here’s what you often see:

I noticed during an online training session with Paul Randal (blog | twitter) that he was using a set up for his SQL query window that to me was more practical – it had the editor in one tab and the messages / other tabs next to the editor rather than below it.
Like this:

It took me a bit of searching and testing, but I finally located the setting and decided to document it here so I wouldn’t forget where it was again.
From the main menu, click on Tools then select Options…. Once the Options dialog pops up, expand Query Results > SQL Server > Results To Grid. In the list of settings, check both “Display results in a separate tab” and “Switch to results tab after the query executes”. Then click [OK].

SQL will save your settings and next query window you open will use the new view.
In addition, in the Options dialog, you may wish to change the font size. That setting is under Environment – Fonts and Colors. I’d only have it large for presentations where I have enough long queries that I need to display a large section of the window. For ones with smaller queries, I’d use “Zoom-it” because I can zoom in on the text I’m talking about and then zoom back out when finished. Zoom-it also lets you annotate the zoomed in window with drawn lines or additional text in various colors. The annotations disappear when you zoom back out, but they’re handy for pointing out key information.
Happy presenting!