Regular Sized Data

I’m back at it again for at least one more post on that California salary data I put together. This time I want to look at our data with a bit more focus. I want to see which tech jobs have grown between 2013 and the present, with respect to the number of positions and salary. I’m starting with 2013, since some of the job titles are missing in the 2011 and 2012 data. We’ll use our usual filter to only focus on the thirteen non-managerial tech job titles, and we’ll look at the state as a whole. [Read More]

Last time I presented some comparisons of average DBA salaries in California. But the data set I’ve been looking at has more than just info on DBA’s. This time I’m going to walk through some queries that look at other tech salaries in California and the distribution of tech jobs accross the state. [Read More]

In my last post I talked about a new database of California salary data I put together (get it here). I’ve had some time to begin looking at the data, and I started with the thing that caught my eye the first time I saw the raw data: it has DBA salaries broken down by geographic region. So first, let’s get a sense of how well being a DBA pays in California, and we can compare it to the average salary for each region of California in 2016. [Read More]

A few months ago, I read an article in a local paper about the low(ish) wages and high cost of living in the area. This was no surprise, but I was intrigued by a data set the article cited. The California government and the Occupational Employment Statistics and Wages program has a page with hundreds of Excel sheets with pretty fine-grained data on wages in California broken done by region and occupation. For example, the data could provide the average salary for a DBA in San Luis Obispo for each of the last five years. I don’t know anywhere else... [Read More]

At a former job, a coworker opined that Oracle was a better RDBMS than SQL Server, because it allowed you to undo (rollback) your update, insert, and delete statements. No one batted an eye at this statement, since we were a department full of feral SQL ninjas who regularly modified SQL Server databases, without ever explicity creating a transaction. We just made sure we had backups. [Read More]

It’s 2017 and blogs aren’t cool anymore. Why am I making one now? Here are some reasons: [Read More]

Why would you need to make a string of random letters and numbers via SQL? You probably don’t, but you might if you want to load a database with sample data for the purpose of testing queries or if you want to create a temporary password for an account, whose credentials are stored in a SQL database. Most importantly, though, it’s an interesting task, because it allows us to explore some of the more uncommon functions in SQL Server. It’s also a fun topic, because you don’t need to be working in any particular database; we’ll use SQL Server to... [Read More]