T-SQL Tuesday 185 Wrap Up: Video Star Edition #tsql2sday

T-SQL Tuesday 185 Wrap Up: Video Star Edition #tsql2sday

---

Video Summary

In this video, I recap the engaging T-SQL Tuesday 185 event where community members were encouraged to share their thoughts through videos rather than blog posts. The response was quite diverse and entertaining—ranging from humorous technical mishaps to insightful demonstrations and heartfelt reflections. Highlights included Rob’s creative green-screen trick in SQL Server Management Studio, Andy Levy’s exploration of the Object Explorer Details feature, and Andy Yoon’s practical stored procedure for expanding view references. Other submissions covered topics like flat file wizard capabilities, content consumption preferences, empathy as a technical skill, and personal experiences with presenting and blogging. It was fascinating to see how these videos provided not just information but also a glimpse into the personalities behind each contribution.

Full Transcript

Erik Darling here with Darling Data, and this is going to be my T-SQL Tuesday 185 wrap-up video in which I asked the nice folks out there in the SQL Server community to record it, rather than write a blog post about a specific topic, to just record a video about anything. And I got, I don’t know, seven or so pingbacks on that. If anyone out there recorded something and didn’t ping me back, sorry. If you don’t tell me, I don’t know. So, anyway, first, you know, in true he whom the gods would destroy they first make mad fashion, the video that I recorded to invite people, I had a weird little audio glitch going on. And I thought that I fixed it, and then I didn’t fix it, and then I didn’t get a chance to re-record it, and then, I don’t know, I was fully expecting at least one of the video submissions. to make fun of my bad robot voice in the video, but everyone was just, it was kind enough to not make fun of my slight technical difficulty. I’ve managed to avoid a lot of those in recent videos, so, I don’t know, I guess, I don’t know, maybe I’ve earned it. Anyway, our first video came in, of course, I’m going to say this video came in first, but only because Rob is cheating with time zone magic.

Usually he’s cheating with normal magic tricks, but this is just time zone magic. And Rob’s video, he talks about the cool mappy scroll bar on the side of SQL Server Management Studio. Of course, that’s available back, I remember when that first came out, but, you know, at first I didn’t like it because it was, like, too big on the side, and, like, when you hover, like, this, I know it’s an option, but, like, you hover over it, and you get, like, this, like, giant, like, preview of the text in there. And, like, it just, like, got in the way a lot with stuff, you know, it’s, like, there’s a certain amount of tooling where it’s just, like, sometimes these, like, pop-up things are helpful, and then sometimes it’s just, like, obtrusive. But with SSMS 21, I think I’ve been liking it a little bit more. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s the dark mode, who knows.

But Rob actually did a very cool trick where he green-screened himself into SQL Server Management Studio. I might steal that from you someday, Rob. I don’t know when or why or how, but I’ll figure it out and do that. Anyway, thank you, Rob, for this lovely video. Next up, we had Sir Andy Levy talking about one of actually, one of my favorite things in SSMS that, this is, like, one of those things that, like, actually kind of wows clients when I’m on the phone with them, is the Object Explorer Details. So, like, you can either, like, right-click and go to Object Explorer Details, or if you’re in SQL Server Management Studio, when you, like, highlight a database or a server or something, and you press F7, that’s F like Frank 7, you get this new thing that pops up that gives you all sorts of neat details.

And one of my favorite things about it is, like, just to give an example, if you have a table with a bunch of indexes on it, and you want to script out all the indexes and just see what’s in there, if you hit F7 and you go to Object Explorer Details, you can actually multi-click stuff and right-click on everything that you’ve just multi-clicked, and you can hit Script, and you can get all the indexes rather than clicking on, like, one index at a time and scripting it.

It’s very convenient for many things. So, good job there, Andy Levy. You read my mind, or something. Next up is Andy Yoon with an actually very helpful stored procedure.

I would be terrified to run on some of my client environments. It is called SP Help Expand View. And what SP Help Expand View does is, if you have a view with a bunch of nested views in it, it’ll go through and find all the view references.

And there’s an optional mode where it will give you a count of, like, how many times things are referenced in the view. So, that’s a very, very cool thing to have. Like I said, I’d be a little afraid to run it and get, like, 90 columns of nested views back.

But if you’re feeling brave and bold out there or just particularly pioneering in one of the environments you work in, I would highly recommend using this to help yourself untangle the nastiness of nested views. So, well done, Andy.

Well done. All right. The next submission I had was Steve Jones pushing the boundaries of cutting-edge technology with testing the flat file wizard, in which Steve discovers that the flat file wizard can handle multiple delimiters, not just commas and fixed width, but also pipes and some other stuff.

And then at the very end of the video, Steve submits a pull request to the Microsoft Docs site where he makes some improvements to that. So, Steve really, like, pushed the envelope of not only data engineering, but also DevOps and, I don’t know, something else probably. But good job, Steve.

Steve, we now can use the flat file wizard with a bit more confidence, I hope, when we’re dealing with our flat files. All right. The next submission I got was from Deb, whose background, for some reason, looks nothing like Andy’s background.

At least last I heard, they’re still married. I hope I’m not messing anything up there. But she is asking some questions about stuff.

She wants to know how you consume content. She wants to know the type of content you prefer. She brings up some good points about videos where, like, it’s harder to watch videos. It’s harder to sit down and dedicate the time to, like, sit there and watch one thing and just, like, absorb that.

If you have something written, you can, like, go to it and come back to it and sort of, like, follow stuff around and, like, you know, take bites as you can. With videos, it’s a little bit harder to do that. I often find myself with, I mean, anything audio related, you know, it’s not just videos where there’s, like, a visual component.

But, like, I’ll find myself, like, I’ll put something, like, on a podcast. I’m like, oh, I really want to hear about this. And, of course, I’m sitting at my computer.

So I’m nip, dip, dip, dip, dip. And, like, you know, like, 45 minutes goes by and I realize I’ve absorbed nothing from over here. So valid points. I get it.

But, you know, also talks a bit about how the bots out there are stealing the words and not giving credit for the words. And, I don’t know, I think probably Sam Altman and, by extension, Microsoft owes all of us a very big royalty check for all the training material they’ve gotten from us. I’ve got a copyright on my blog posts.

I don’t know about you. I’m waiting for my royalty check in the mail. All right. Next up, our dear friend Mala, who is, oh, look out. Look at tiny Mala in the corner.

Why is Mala hiding? There’s Mala. Wonder why. Wonder why Mala is so small over there. But she has a great video about empathy being a technical skill.

Hopefully one that I learn someday. I would love to someday empath myself, empower myself with empathy or something like that. But good job there, Mala.

We could all stand to be a bit more empathetic in the world. Especially to people who have audio technical issues when writing a recording to invite people, or rather, recording a video to invite people to record videos. So, I guess the SQL community has a bunch of empathy in it.

All right. All right. And the final one was from our dear friend, Making Plans for Nigel, who got all dressed up, wore a Darling Data t-shirt. One of the few people who, I guess, didn’t donate the one they got for free from me at a conference to a homeless shelter.

So, thanks for that, Nigel. And recorded a lovely video from his backyard talking about his experiences with sort of like presenting and blogging and getting turned down from conference. It was an expansive video.

There are big feelings in this video. A lot of big feelings. But he is curious because he does put a question out there. Would you like to see more of these?

And, of course, Nigel, we would always like to see more of you and your fabulous backyard. All right. So, that’s the wrap-up. I hope that everyone out there who recorded a video enjoyed recording the video.

Maybe it will spark some more recording magic from you. I do like watching videos and getting a sense of the person behind all the content. But maybe I might be somewhat alone in that.

I don’t know. Anyway, thank you for watching. And I will, I don’t know. I don’t know when the next time I’m going to host a T-SQL Tuesday is. I think we’re rate limited to like once a year. So, you might not see me again until, what is it, 2026 is next year?

Good God. Someone stop this thing. Anyway, thank you for watching. Bye.

Going Further

---

If this is the kind of SQL Server stuff you love learning about, you’ll love my training. Blog readers get 25% off the Everything Bundle — over 100 hours of performance tuning content. Need hands-on help? I offer consulting engagements from targeted investigations to ongoing retainers. Want a quick sanity check before committing to a full engagement? Schedule a call — no commitment required.