Welcome to another coffee break post where I quickly write up something on my mind that can be written and read in less time than a coffee break takes.
This morning I was doing my normal work when I had a realization that I should share something I find super useful and use frequently use in SSMS that a lot of developers seem to not know about. They are small actions but they make your life easier when doing a lot of query editing in SSMS.
How to Minimize the Results Window
I have told many developers about this keyboard shortcut and they all appreciated it. I’m sure most people that frequently work in SSMS would like to be able to minimize and maximize the results window as needed in order to give themselves more screen real estate to work with while coding but still be able to see their query results as needed. But there is no minimize button for the results window of SSMS.
The only way that I know of to minimize and then maximize the results window in SSMS is to do CTRL + R. I use this keyboard shortcut every day at work while writing queries or updating existing queries.
How to Refresh the Intellisense
I have also had to tell many developers about updating the intellisense suggestions of SSMS since it will often trip them up if they don’t know how it works. First, you should understand that the intellisense offered by SSMS is only accurate as of the time you opened your query window or changed the connection for the query window (usually). If you’ve been working in the same query window for a while and have made DDL changes to any tables, functions, stored procedures, etc., intellisense is likely out of date and could tell you that a table or column you’re trying to reference doesn’t exist when you know it does.
If you ever run into this situation where it’s telling you something doesn’t exist but you know it does, use CTRL + SHIFT + R and the intellisense suggestions/corrections will be updated.
Bonus shortcut for Red-Gate SQL Prompt
Similar to the intellisense built in to SSMS, if you are using the SQL Prompt tool from Red-Gate, you can run into the same issue with the tool not recognizing that objects or columns exist when you know that they do. If you run into that issue and would like to update the suggestions list for SQL Prompt, use CTRL + SHIFT + D.
Welcome to another coffee break post where I quickly write up something on my mind that can be written and read in less time than a coffee break takes.
When you start working with Git Bash for the first time (or you have your computer completely reimaged and have to reinstall everything again like I did recently), you will likely encounter a command line text editor called Vim to edit your commits or to do any other text editing needed for Git. And if you’re like me, you probably won’t like trying to use a keyboard-only interface for updating your commit messages. If that’s the case, then I have a quick tutorial for how to make Git use a normal text editor to more easily update your commit messages.
What is Vim?
Vim is an open-source text editor that can be used in a GUI interface or a command line interface. My only familiarity with it is with the command line interface, as the default text editor that Git comes installed with. If you don’t update your Git configuration to specify a different text editor, you will see a screen like the following whenever you need to create or update a commit message in a text editor (like when you complete a revert and Git generates a generic commit message for you then gives you the opportunity to update it, or when you want to amend an existing commit). This is what the command line editor version of Vim looks like (at least on my computer).
I personally don’t like this text editor because to use it, you need to know specific keyboard commands to navigate all operations and I don’t want to learn and remember those when I can use a GUI-based text editor instead to make changes more quickly and intuitively.
After you execute that command in Git Bash, you can run this command to test it, which should open up Notepad++ to try to update the last commit you made: git commit --amend.
That blog post then says that you should be able to double-check your Git configuration file to see that the editor has been changed, but my file doesn’t reflect what the other post says despite Notepad++ be opened for commit messages after I ran the change statement. This is what my gitconfig file currently looks like after setting the editor to Notepad++:
So your mileage may vary on that aspect. As long as the change works for me, I’m not too concerned about what the config file looks like.
How to Revert Text Editor to Vim
If you ever want to change back to the default text editor, you can run the following command to switch back to Vim, and once again confirm it worked using the git commit --amend statement:
git config --global core.editor "vim"
Conclusion
Changing your default text editor for Git Bash is extremely simple as long as you know where the exe file of your preferred editor is stored on your computer. It’s also simple to change back to the default Vim editor in the future if you want or need to.
Note: I am NOT sponsored in any way for this post. Everything contained in this post is my honest opinion and review of the software.
For about a month now, I have been working with a new software for taking notes for my blog as well as personal learning projects, and I have really been loving the tool so thought I would share it and how I get the best use out of it. The tool I am now using is called Obsidian, and it has turned out to be a very simple but useful software for taking notes of any kind for any subject.
Before I made the switch to Obsidian, I was using good old OneNote, the built-in Microsoft note taking software. That worked well enough for me for several months, but I eventually decided to make the switch from it because I was really disliking the organization and look of OneNote and was finding it hard to customize the formatting of my text in the way that I wanted. OneNote has predefined styles for headings, plain text, and code snippets, and I wasn’t liking those options anymore. In previous versions of OneNote, I swear I was able to customize the styles to my liking, but the version I had been working with before switching to Obsidian did not allow that. Plus, I was really just finding the whole app a bit ugly and outdated looking, so I started the search for a new tool.
In my search of note taking options, there were a lot of different apps that gave the customization I wanted, but they usually required a subscription to use them for more than a few simple notes, and I am adamant right now that I don’t want to add another paid subscription to my life. The one really great looking option was Obsidian.
I sat on my research for about a month until I got really tired of the flaws of OneNote, especially the code formatting options since most of the notes I have been taking recently have been with Python. Then I finally downloaded Obsidian and have been using and loving it since.
What is Obsidian?
Obsidian is a markdown-based, text-editor-like note taking tool that is more bare-bones than OneNote but allows you to do a lot more formatting and linking of notes than OneNote is ever going to be capable of. Obsidian even includes a graph features that allows you to look at how all your notes are linked together, which it says can help you visually see how your thoughts are connected.
On the back end, your Obsidian Vault (how they refer to what I would call a notebook) is simply a folder structure full of individual markdown (.md) files that each contain one of your pages of notes. Since it is so simple on the back end, it is easy to keep organized and backed up with any software you normally use to backup your local files.
Below are screenshots showing what my Obsidian notebook looks like on my computer in File Explorer, and one screenshot showing what those same notes look like within the Obsidian app.
Screenshot showing the folder structure within my Obsidian Vault using File ExplorerScreenshot showing the individual note markdown files within the Python folder of my Obsidian vaultScreenshot of the Vault explorer pane in Obsidian
As you can see from the screenshots, it really is just simple files stored on my computer, but those files look much sleeker and more organized within the actual Obsidian app.
It took me a few days to get used to using Obsidian, but I got the hang of it quickly and decided it was going to be my one source of truth for notes going forward. It’s bee nice enough to use that I have even stopped using my physical notebooks for now, which I didn’t think would ever happen (where will I put all of my fun stickers now if not a physical notebook??).
How I organize my notes
As you can see from the screenshots above, I currently have my notebook organized into multiple folders. The most notable are Attachments, Blog, and Topical Notes. The best part of Obsidian is that you are able to customize it to meet your exact needs, so I am only showing how I have mine organized to maybe give others ideas for how they might organize their notes. This organization is very specific to my current needs.
Attachments
I created this folder based on advice I read from others online who use Obsidian as well, and it’s a great way to keep any images you have pasted into your notes organized, due to how Obsidian handles attachments in notes. When you insert an image or screenshot into a note, not only does the image get pasted where you want it to in your note, but that image also gets saved as a separate file into your Vault, at the very top level of the file structure. While that may be fine for others, I was really disliking it due to the number of screenshots I was copying into notes, so the main view of what’s in my notebook was getting very cluttered with all the image files visible at the top level.
(Technically, the image that you see pasted into your notes is just a link to the physical image file, but done in such a way that it appears as if the image is just stored within the text. But since every note page in Obsidian is a markdown file, it cannot store in itself an actual image, so that’s why the links are used.)
So to clean up my vault/notebook a bit, I created the Attachments folder and I copy all image files and other attachments into the folder after pasting them into my notes. It can be a bit annoying at times because I have to move every single image that I paste into the specified folder, but it’s really not that bad and makes the notebook look nicer so I’m happy to do it.
Blog
As you might guess, the Blog folder contains all my notes related to my blog, including drafts of posts that I am working on as well as other pages including lists of tasks I want to accomplish and future goals for the blog. Nothing too crazy in this folder.
Topical Notes
This section is where I put various notes about technology or anything else I am working on learning, when the topic isn’t big enough for its own folder/section but needs to be organized somewhere. Currently, this folder only contains some notes for OLAP data storage & processing as well as Snowflake.
How I save my notes
Unless you want to pay for a subscription, you will not have a built-in function for saving your Obsidian Vault to the cloud or have any easy way to sync your files across multiple devices. But thankfully, since everything with the tool is file-based, it is very easy to use an existing cloud storage service you may already have to save and sync your files across devices. One option would be to use OneDrive, another is to use Git and that is the option I am currently using.
To make my notes available to me easily no matter where I may be working, I decided that the best solution for saving my notes off my computer would be to use GitHub, since I already have an account with them. I created a private repository on GitHub and pulled that down to my local and set up Obsidian in that repo. Since creating that, it has been super easy and intuitive for me to save my notes every day by pushing to the remote GitHub repo.
Other Features
One main feature that Obsidian uses as a selling point that I haven’t found useful for my own purposes yet is the Graph View of my notes. The graph view shows you a physical graph (like the data structure) of how your notes are linked to each other. I haven’t found this useful because, while I do link some of my notes occasionally, I am not doing a lot of linking and don’t feel the need to view my notes in essentially a “mind map” format. But others who are more visual thinkers could find it useful. That feature is certainly unique to this software.
Screenshot showing the Graph View of my Obsidian notebook, very few links between files at this point
As you can see from that screenshot above, I have hardly done any linking with my notes yet, so the graph view doesn’t show anything useful for me. (FYI the blanked out boxes are for upcoming posts that I didn’t want to leak.)
Obsidian also has a feature called Canvas, which I haven’t played around with much, but it seems like a tool that might be nice to help you plan out large projects or any type of work with notes or ideas that connect to each other. The Canvas reminded me a bit of LucidChart, but it seems more focused on helping you organize your thoughts rather than to make flow charts.
Screenshot showing a sample Canvas I created using one of my Obsidian note pages and a “card”
Pros of Obsidian
Works well with code snippets, since it has simple markdown functionality for that style
If you are a programmer or are just learning code, being able to format the code nicely in your notes is wonderful
You don’t need to use the mouse to change to code formatting while typing, just use the markdown symbols
Notes are stored on your own system which makes them as secure as your computer– no need to worry that the company is going to get hacked and compromise your data
Simple yet robust note-taking features, with just enough styling options to make it personal yet not hard to read
Modern design and function
Can use most keyboard styling shortcuts available in other text editing tools (e.g. CTRL+I to make text italic, CTRL + B to make text bold, etc.)
Cons of Obsidian
Uses markdown styling for all text formatting options, so you need to learn that to be able to style text how you want
I have been going back to this cheat sheet multiple times to remind me how to do markdown formatting
Once you get the hang of it, it’s really easy to do all sorts of custom formatting
Must buy a license if you want to use it for work, even if you’re not the owner of the company
I would love to be able to use this tool for all my work notes since it’s so customizable yet simple
The current subscription price for one person is $50 USD per year, which is reasonable, I just don’t want to pay for yet another subscription service right now
Must manage your own cloud saving and syncing across devices if you don’t want to pay for Obsidian Sync
Difficult to add color or other text customizations beyond bold & italic to your notes, must use inline HTML to add colors
Can’t specify your own ordering of notes, will always be placed in alphabetic order
I think this is the biggest annoyance to me for the most part, sometimes it would be nice to keep your notes in a specific, non-alphabetic ordering
The easiest way to keep things in the order you want is to use numbers or symbols at the beginning of note names (I put the date at the beginning of each note to keep it organized better, and then put symbols like ! at the beginning of the title for notes I always want at the top of the list)
Conclusion
Obsidian is a great free tool to use for taking organized and useful notes right on your own computer. While there are a few features of the tool that are annoying to use at times, it has more positives than negatives. I would recommend that anyone in a technical field take a chance with Obsidian for their notes solution if they’re looking to try something new and modern.
Welcome to a coffee break post where I quickly write up something on my mind that can be written and read in less time than a coffee break takes.
Recently, while exploring possible options for converting our existing ETLs to working with Postgres, I found myself asking the question “can you update a table using a view that has been created on that table?” and the answer is Yes for both Postgres and SQL Server, which I learned after doing some research.
In Postgres, there is a concept of an updatable view, which is essentially a very simple view, that usually doesn’t include a join to a second (or third or more) table. There are other qualifications for what makes a view updatable, but it is generally the fact that the query creating the view is very simple. If a view meets these criteria, you can in fact update the base table using a query to the view.
For example, if you have a table called employee, then you create a view on top of that table which selects most but not all the columns from the base table, with the view being called v_employee, you can then run this query and it will update the data in employee.
UPDATE v_employee
SET full_name = 'George Smith'
WHERE emp_id = 15;
This concept is intriguing to me, and could also be really useful in updating our ETLs more quickly after we convert to Postgres, so I thought I would share this fun little fact with everyone.
If you haven’t seen it already, I had two previous posts listing differences I have found between Postgres and SQL Server while learning to develop in the Postgres environment. As I am continuing to learn, I am finding even more differences that I think are interesting, and they are going to be shared below.
The difference between SQL Server and Postgres for creating a temp table is small, but significant. Mostly because my company uses temp tables frequently in our stored procedure and ETL code, so as we migrate off of SQL Server, we’re going to have to do a lot of updating to move temp table statements to Postgres. The syntax for SQL Server is to use a hashtag/pound/number symbol in front of the table name, or to use a double-pound symbol to create a global temporary table, like “CREATE TABLE #MyTable” or “CREATE TABLE ##MyGlobalTempTable“. In Postgres, the syntax requires that you use the TEMP or TEMPORARY keyword to make the temp table, like “CREATE TEMP[ORARY] TABLE my_table“.
You also have to use the TEMP or TEMPORARY keyword when creating a temp table in Postgres by doing a SELECT INTO statement, such as SELECT column1, column2 INTO TEMP TABLE my_table. In SQL Server, that same command would look like SELECT column1, column2 INTO #MyTable.
General differences between temp tables in each engine
Not only is the way you create temporary tables different between Postgres and SQL Server, but how the tables are actually stored on the database is completely different between the two as well.
In SQL Server, any temporary objects are stored in a separate database called tempdb. When creating a temporary table, you can specify whether it’s localized to your current session only or whether it is a global temporary table that can be accessed from different sessions or query windows, as I mentioned above. To do the first, you specify the table name as #MyTable, then the do the latter, you specify the table name as ##MyTable.
In Postgres, temporary tables are not stored in a separate database. Instead, they are put into their own system schemas whose names are based on numerical values (ex. pg_temp_1, pg_temp_2, etc.), so it’s harder to see the specific location where your temp table is being stored. You also are generally unable to access a temp table in one session from a different session, so there is no concept of a global temp table in Postgres.
One similarity of temp tables between the two engines, though, is that they are dropped/deleted in both as soon as the session in which they were created ends.
Getting the current UTC time
In SQL Server, there are two built-in functions that allow you to get the current UTC time, GETUTCDATE() and SYSUTCDATETIME(). The former returns the time in type DATETIME, and the latter returns the time in type DATETIME2 (more precise).
Postgres also has multiple functions and methods of getting the current UTC time, but they look much different from each other than the SQL Server options look. While there are more than just these two options, the most common ways to get the UTC time are the following:
SELECT NOW() AT TIME ZONE 'utc';
SELECT CURRENT_TIMESTAMP AT TIME ZONE 'utc'
Although the two options look different, they will return the same value. I’ve had some issues trying to use one versus the other in different scenarios in the SQL code I’ve written for Postgres, so it seems like there may be times where it’s better to use one over the other, but I’m just not able to differentiate those scenarios right now. There are also other options for getting the current UTC time, but I won’t cover those here.
Updating a table with a JOIN
One of the biggest syntax differences between T-SQL and pgSQL that has really gotten me confused so far is the formatting of an UPDATE statement that includes a JOIN to a different table. To me, the syntax of T-SQL makes a lot more logical sense and the pgSQL syntax doesn’t seem as intuitive. The T-SQL syntax is as follows:
UPDATE p
SET p.MyColumn = s.MyColumn
FROM person AS p
INNER JOIN staging AS s
ON s.MyColumn2 = p.MyColumn2
Then the syntax for pgSQL is:
UPDATE person
SET p.my_column = s.my_column
FROM staging
WHERE staging.my_column2 = person.my_column2
To me, the pgSQL syntax doesn’t scream “joining to a different table”; it really looks to me like a simple update statement without a join. Yet the join is there. Also, it doesn’t seem to let you use aliases for the query, which I also dislike since I use aliases for every query I write. I wish I could change the standard for the pgSQL syntax, but obviously that isn’t within my power so I’m going to have to learn to live with it.
Making a column nullable
Unlike the pgSQL syntax for updating a table using a join to a different table, I actually like the syntax of making a column nullable in pgSQL more than I like the T-SQL syntax. The pgSQL syntax seems much more clear and straightforward for this action. The syntax in Postgres for making a NOT NULL column nullable is as follows: ALTER TABLE my_table ALTER COLUMN my_column DROP NOT NULL;
The T-SQL syntax for the same action is less clear, since you are basically redefining the column like you would if you were adding it, instead of specifying what you are changing. If you had a column that was set to NOT NULL in a table, you would write out the whole definition of the column again but write NULL instead of NOT NULL. For example: ALTER TABLE Mytable ALTER COLUMN MyColumn INT NULL;
I’m not fond of that T-SQL syntax because you can’t tell at a glance what is changing with the column definition unless you already knew what it was before running the statement. Since that same statement would also be the same syntax for changing the data type for the column if the column was already set to be nullable.
Data type for automatically updated binary numbers
In SQL Server, there is a data type called TIMESTAMP or ROWVERSION that is an automatically updating binary value that is added to a record when that record is updated or inserted. (The TIMESTAMP synonym for the ROWVERSION data type has been deprecated.) My company currently uses this data type heavily to help identify changed data quickly for our ETLs. As we are looking at moving everything into the Postgres world, we have found that Postgres does not have any built-in functionality similar to the ROWVERSION column, at least not at the precision we would need it to be (you can read about system columns here). You of course can store binary data within a table, but there is no data type for columns that will automatically increment a binary value when data is changed with the same precision as SQL Server’s ROWVERSION.
There do seem to be some ways people have replicated that functionality using custom triggers/functions that we are considering, but I haven’t looked into it that much personally so I cannot yet speak to how well that would work to replicate SQL Server’s ROWVERSION functionality. So we are either going to have to add these custom triggers/functions or find another reliable and fast way to identify changed data between source and target for our ETLs. Soon, I am hoping to do a blog post about the possible Change Data Capture (CDC) options for Postgres that we are considering.
Conclusion
There are so many weird quirks and differences between SQL Server and Postgres that I am having to learn as I grow in the Postgres development space. While I have already listed so many of them across several posts now, I am sure there will be many more to come as I keep learning. And I will continue to compile a list of the differences and share them here on my blog as I find them.
Despite already writing a similar post about this topic myself, I have still been struggling recently to keep my work at work, struggling with not thinking about it in my free time in the evenings and on weekends. Looking for some professional guidance from an outside perspective online, I found this great article from Harvard Business Review that I want to share with others.
Using Technology to Log Out for the Day
Steps 1 and 3 from the article come easily to me. While I don’t have specific hours I am required to be at work, I am great at keeping a regular work schedule for myself that I don’t normally deviate from. Once I log out at 5 PM each day, I don’t check Teams messages, and I don’t even have my work email on my phone so I can’t check that even if I wanted to. I manage this system using the Focus Time feature on my iPhone.
I have two different scheduled Focus Time settings for my phone: 1) Work and 2) Personal Time. I’ve set up the Work Focus Time to be active during my normal work hours and it only allows notifications from Teams, my two-factor authentication apps, and a couple of important family members. Then I’ve set up the Personal Time custom Focus Time to be the opposite: it runs from the time I get off work to the time I start work in the morning and blocks any notifications from Teams or other work-related applications.
This system has been working really well for me and I would recommend others try it out if they haven’t already, because then you never need to think about which notifications to turn off after work each day, or worse, just keep getting those notifications all evening and weekend long that take your mind back to work when it shouldn’t be there.
Struggling with “Mental Clarity” Around Work
Steps 2 and 4 from the HBR article are more challenging for me lately than I would like them to be. Step 2 is to get “mental clarity”, which essentially means that you should know each day what tasks you need to accomplish at work, by keeping a running to-do list or somewhere else to manage all your thoughts about work. I used to be great at this before the last couple months, when my job became less clear and began changing. I stopped keeping a physical notebook because I needed a new system to keep related notes related and physically close since I now have larger projects to manage rather than small tickets to work on daily or weekly. Once I stopped heavily utilizing my physical notebook, I stopped creating daily to-do lists for myself to accomplish.
Not having a go-to place to list out all the current and future things I will need to complete has led to the problem of me randomly remembering important things I need to do for work at inconvenient times, like when I’m trying to fall asleep. I’m sure many can relate to that. This mental clarity step reminds me of the book “Getting Things Done” by David Allen that I read a couple years ago. One of the main points of that book is you need to be constantly dumping thoughts out of your head onto paper (or anywhere you want as long as it’s consistent) so your brain can trust it doesn’t need to constantly remind you of important things at inappropriate times. If you know that you always write important tasks in the same location, you know that anything important is in that location and not just in your head. The Harvard Business Review article made me realize I need to get back to that organization method and start actually using the digital note page I made awhile ago that is supposed to act as my catch-all list of items on my plate now and in the future.
One final note on the mental clarity step of keeping work at work– I actually do still manage to complete an end-of-day wrap up each work day where I write out everything I accomplished throughout the day along with notes for what I need to do the next day and a review of the next day’s calendar. I occasionally skip days of this, so I would like to schedule time for this each day going forward so I’m more diligent about doing it.
The Need to Feel Accomplished
The final step to keeping work at work recommended in the article that I’ve been struggling with the most recently is step 4, which says that you need to get work done at work. It may seem crazy for someone to not get work done during their work day if they’re showing up on time and leaving usually later than they should, but it is entirely possible if you allow your entire schedule to be consumed by meetings with no or minimal time between them. My job has morphed into a collaboration-focused position where I suddenly need to have meetings upon meetings about everything related to the projects I am working on. This means that on an average day, I have multiple hours of meetings with colleagues, and somehow they all seem to leave 30-minute gaps between to tease me with the possibility of getting work done, but then I never actually get time to focus in those gaps.
This cycle of continual meetings and no long stretches of work time has made it really difficult for me to have any decent amount of time to focus on the deliverables I need to complete. While sure, you could theoretically get good work done in the 30 minutes between meetings, reality is much different when you need to work on a confusing or difficult task. Those types of work items are better suited for longer stretches of dedicated focus time, at least one hour but hopefully two or more. That is a rare occurrence in my current work life and I want to change that, and will do so by following the recommendations of this HBR article, and actually some of my own advice from a previous blog post. I need to schedule blocks of one or more hours each day to focus on work. My plan is to do that on Friday afternoons the week before or Monday mornings the week of, so I can block out work time for an entire week to get ahead of meetings that will inevitably be scheduled.
Summary
While the advice of the Harvard Business Review article isn’t entirely new to me, it did act as a great trigger to remind me of the valuable work skills I have neglected recently so I can revive them. Going forward, I am going to revitalize my use of my own calendar and digit notebook to see if that helps me feel more in control and less caught up in the whirlwind at work.
Give the HBR article a read and see if any of it speaks to you like it spoke to me. Is there something in your work-life balance situation that could be improved to reduce your overall stress?
This may seem like a ridiculous thing to need to write about, making the Red-Gate tool SQL Prompt generate prompts like it should, but I have been having a weird issue with it over the past couple months and have finally learned the solution. So of course I thought I should share it!
What is SQL Prompt?
SQL Prompt is a tool made by Red-Gate that works as a much cleaner, nicer, and more useful autocomplete feature for SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS). It is a plugin you install to SSMS that then seems to magically work to help you write queries faster. Not only does this tool autocomplete databases, schemas, tables, and column names for you in your queries, but it also provides a lot of other useful tools like a Snippets Manager, which allows you to use default and custom snippets to write code faster (e.g. writing “sf” then pressing Tab will type out “SELECT * FROM” for you so all you need to type is the table name you want to select from).
Every developer in my organization uses this tool heavily in our day-to-day operations while writing any SQL scripts because it makes writing queries so much faster. So when my SQL Prompt seemed to stop working after an update, I was getting really frustrated because it meant I had to write all of my SQL queries manually again. And when all you do all day is write SQL, that adds up to a significant hindrance to your work speed.
My Problem
The problem I was having with SQL Prompt was that when I connected to any of our RDS database instances, the tool would no longer do any prompting of schemas, tables, or columns which was making my coding life so much harder. Oddly, the snippets manager portion of the tool was still working fine, so at least I wasn’t needing to type out the queries I normally use the snippets shortcuts for. Also oddly, Prompt would work perfectly fine connecting to other databases that weren’t on RDS instances, it was only happening for RDS databases.
I dealt with this issue for months on our production server, since I figured it was due to the security settings or something else I wouldn’t be able to fix, and I don’t access prod servers very frequently, so when I did use them and the Prompt wasn’t working, it wasn’t as bothersome. But after I had to completely reset my developer computer and reinstalled SQL Prompt, I started having this same issue for our lower environment databases, that I work with every day, so Prompt not prompting was suddenly a big deal.
The Solution
I created a support ticket with Red-Gate since I’ve always had good luck with their support services. This time wasn’t any different. Within a couple hours of creating the ticket, I had an email from a support rep asking me if I had tried checking the “Trust Server Certificate” check box on the Connection Properties tab while connecting to the RDS servers. No, I had not done that because I did not know that was an option before that day.
I disconnected from the RDS server then reconnected, making sure to check that box before clicking “Connect”, and now I had SQL Prompt back up and working, providing prompts of schemas, tables, and columns just like I want it to. Yay!
I also logged onto our prod server to see if doing the same thing there would fix that issue, and it fixed Prompt there as well. I am so excited to be able to not type out every detail of every SQL query again!
Welcome to another coffee break post where I quickly write up something on my mind that can be written and read in less time than a coffee break takes.
Background
Recently, I went through an AWS workshop for Lake Formation, a data lake management tool in AWS, and that workshop had me create many different Cloud Formation Templates (CFTs) to spin up services to use in the workshop. After I finished that, I then had to go through my development AWS account for work and clean up everything that had been created so we stopped paying for these services I no longer needed.
While attempting to delete the many CFTs I had used, I saw one that was seemingly stuck in the DELETE_IN_PROGRESS state for almost 20 minutes. I did not realize it would take so long to delete one CFT and was getting worried that it was actually stuck. So I started searching online to see if this has happened to others as well.
Why does the delete take so long?
I found this Reddit post of someone reporting the same thing, and it linked to a very informative answer to a similar question on Stack Overflow. I would recommend you go and read that detailed answer there for the best understanding of why CFTs sometimes take forever to delete.
The simple answer is that is just how it is. My CFT in question had set up a lot of Virtual Private Clouds (VPCs), Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances, Elastic Network Interfaces (ENIs) as well as other resources, and some of those items simply take awhile to delete.
Even though I can’t speed up the deletion process for these big CFTs, at least now I know that in the future, should I need to delete any other large CFTs from my AWS account, I can expect it might take longer than I would anticipate to complete.
I have been trying to learn how to work with AWS Glue because it’s probably going to be a new ETL solution my organization uses as we migrate to Postgres in AWS. Part of learning how to use Glue is learning how to set up and use Postgres RDS instances so that I can move data between them with Glue.
Setting up the RDS instances was the easy part, since AWS makes that process go very smoothly. Even setting up the EC2 jump server to connect locally to my RDS instances seemed like it was easy as well, only a few options to select and then a new server was created for me.
The Problem
However, in my most recent attempt at creating all 3 of these servers (I have to regularly delete what I have while not using it to not incur additional charges), I kept running into an issue where my EC2 server was not being assigned an IPv4 Public DNS address, and without that value, I can’t connect to that server as a jump host on my local computer. That was a big problem for me.
I spent over a half hour trying to troubleshoot this problem, double-checking the VPC rules for DNS and everything I could think of, and none of it was working. I terminated and recreated the instance multiple times and that did not do the trick. Finally I found this Stack Overflow answer that was exactly what I needed, and the fix was super obvious but also hard to see at the same time.
The Solution was Simple
For some unknown reason, the settings that AWS defaulted to when I was creating new instances was to set “Auto-assign public IP” to “Disabled”, and I didn’t catch it at first because that section of the instance creation settings was in a non-editable state by default as well. If you run into this same issue, when you get to the “Network Settings” part of your instance creation dialog and “Auto-assign public IP” is set as Disabled and it looks like there’s no way to change that, click the edit button at the top right of that pane to change the default instance settings. Then Enable the option to assign a public IP address to the instance.
It’s that simple. I can’t believe it took me so long to figure out something so obvious! But that’s life in IT sometimes.
Extra Note
When you stop and then start your EC2 instance again, it will assign a new Public IPv4 DNS name to the instance. It took me longer than I would like to admit to figure this out. I kept having an issue each morning where my SSH tunnels to my RDS databases through this EC2 server would no longer work. After several weeks and trying many different things, I finally figured out that the Public IP address was changing each time I stopped my instance at the end of the work day and restarted it the following day, and that’s what was causing my tunnel to break.
When I started my blog a couple months ago, I determined a posting schedule for myself of once a week on Tuesdays. If you are someone who notices details and patterns, you may have noticed that I went a few weeks without posting at the end of December and into January, but it wasn’t for lack of me trying. In this post I’m going to talk about the issues I faced that prevented me from posting and how I finally got a workaround for the problem that has finally allowed me to start posting again.
Background
While trying to create and edit my tutorial post about working with Liquibase, I kept running into the same vague JSON error when trying to save drafts, always at the same point. The error was: “Updating failed. The response is not a valid JSON response”.
The point at which it always failed was about midway through the post, either when I copied in text that contained double-quote characters or when I added the first image. I spent several weeks going back and forth with Flywheel (the web host I use) support, trying to figure out what was causing this JSON error when I tried to save a draft.
We tried many different things, including the normal troubleshooting steps of disabling plugins, reverting to the default WordPress theme, disabling all of my browser extensions, trying to work in an incognito window, and several other things. I read so many of the articles online discussing how to resolve this error, and none of those solutions worked. On the Flywheel side, they told me they were trying several different server changes, including extending timeout values and other firewall type changes. I even completely restored my website to default, but not even that worked. And then I had to rebuild everything on my website (except for posts and pages which I exported before restoring).
As of the time of writing this, I still don’t officially have a resolution from Flywheel for this error that keeps popping up and generating 403 errors on the backend (I figured that out myself by inspecting what happened when I clicked the “save draft” button). However, thanks to some kind folks on a WordPress forum, I finally figured out a viable workaround that I am actually enjoying using more than the online WordPress admin portal.
The Successful Workaround
The workaround that I am now using, even as I write this, is to use the development tool for WordPress called Local. This tool gives you a local development environment for WordPress that can seamlessly connect with Flywheel and other hosting providers. The setup for the tool was super easy, took me less than 5 minutes. After going through the setup, all I had to do was pull a copy of my site to local and then I have been able to locally edit my website through the tool.
Once you’re done making all your changes, you only need to select to “Push” to your production site, then select which changes you want to be pushed, then it’s quickly sent to your actual production website. It takes a few minutes for Flywheel to update with the changes, but then you can see your locally developed changes on your real site. All without the hassle of the ever-present JSON error when trying to save a draft.
I will be continuing to work with Flywheel to try to resolve the error on my production site, but at least for now, I am able to keep working and posting, back to my normal schedule.
Summary
If you are facing endless errors when trying to create posts for WordPress and you’re hosted with Flywheel, try using the Local tool to develop on your own local machine to see if that helps you in the same way it helped me.
UPDATE
We finally seem to have resolved my issue after going back and forth so many times with the Flywheel support team and continuing to escalate it through all their support levels. I’m not sure if this is what finally resolved the issue as I wasn’t provided any further details, but the last detailed message I received seemed to indicate that something was set up incorrectly with their Web Application Firewall (WAF) that was preventing me from editing. Before getting the issue fixed, I also found that I couldn’t edit the footer of my site because I was also getting 403 errors when trying to save those changes, and that along with my post creation issue has been resolved.
The moral of this update is that if you’re having this same issue and your site is hosted on Flywheel, keep pushing them to try more things on their end, don’t let them say that it must be something with your local environment. They were super great in continuing to try as long as I kept pushing and saying it still wasn’t working. It also seemed to help when I started showing them the exact errors I was getting with the Inspect tool in Chrome so they would have something to work with.
