I remember the first time that I discovered the amazing feature called Common Table Expression (CTE), it was during my first read of Itzik Ben-Gan book (T-SQL Querying), maybe one of the most interesting feature together with Windows Functions.  I know, I am a declared fan of CTE, but we can start defining a CTE as a sort of temporary result set and which exists only during the lifetime of the query.

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The stereotypes are an “easy” and “toxic” way of grouping and split the people, we can find it in every society and it is extended to the professions.  The IT field it is not the exception, in fact, the IT workers profile don’t fit in many of classic “supposed to be” and being realistic, the stereotype is so far to be true, you should read this interesting article in the Wall Street Journal titled “Profile of an IT Worker” (https://www.wsj.com/articles/profile-of-an-it-worker-1382128556).

I always have considered the Continuous Delivery (CD) for Database world as one of the last frontiers to cross, it is not easy at all and the DevOps guys are brave witnesses about it, however, I consider that it is an aim which can be reachable with a mix of effort, compromise and obviously investment (time and money).

The previous aspects mentioned above are from my point of view the most valuable, but we also need to be realistic about in which stage of this process our companies are, I mean, it is not realistic or fair to pretend that a new startup consider spending many resources for implementing DB deployment under
CD vision, but if the team only requires to deploy through a few environments it can be feasible to use a simplistic approach based on using PowerShell.

I have to confess; I have had traumatic experiences with variant data type in my beginning as a software developer, in fact, I always have believed that it is an anti-pattern, at least in the OOP world, on the other hand in the Database world it gains much relevance, Why? Because of every column inside a table is supposed to be a specific datatype, otherwise, it could create a great number of conflicts and uncomfortable situations.