Ten years (and a couple jobs) ago, I wrote about naming default constraints to avoid having SQL Server name them for you. I closed with the following statement:

SQL Server needs a name for the constraint regardless; it’s worth specifying it yourself.

We’re back with a new wrinkle in the story.

I will be presenting my latest session, Documenting Your Work for Worry-Free Vacations, in-person twice in May 2026. With summer vacations coming up, this is a perfect time of year to create or refresh your environment’s documentation so that you can leave the work computer at home, switch that phone off and relax.

This is long overdue but life and distractions happened. It’s been a little over two months since I returned home from PASS Summit 2025.

T-SQL Tuesday is a monthly blog party hosted by a different community member each month. This month, Mike Walsh (blog) asks us:

Write two short notes to yourself. One to the past. One from the future.

Thank you for attending my PASS Summit 2025 session Answering the Auditor’s Call with Automation! I will have a more comprehensive post in the coming days. Slides and demo code are now available in Github as well as through the PASS Summit website. Github will always have the most recent version of the code. There have been additions and bug fixes!

• Github repository
• PASS Data Community Summit session info

I’ve been enjoying Ben Weissmann (Blog | LinkedIn) & Jess Pomfret’s (Blog | LinkedIn ) weekly program Finding Data Friends for a couple years now, getting to know (by proxy) more people in the data community. Every conversation with Jess & Ben is a delight, and we never seem to have enough time. So when they reached out to me a couple months ago about being on episode #123, I of course jumped at the chance. We talked a little data stuff, but that’s not what the show’s really about. It’s what we do outside work, and one thing everyone has in common - food!

In less than one month, I will be speaking not once but twice at PASS Data Community Summit 2025.

Thursday, November 20th at 1 PM I will be in the Community Zone to share my experience as a mentor for FIRST Robotics Team 3003, TANX. Hobby Huddles were a new addition to Summit last year. These lightning talk-sized presentation about something the speaker does outside their day job are a lot of fun to check out. But how do I take something I can talk about all afternoon and compress it down to only 10 minutes?

I don’t recall where this came up (probably in SQLSlack), but I had a need to install an older version of dbatools to test something related to loading the dbatools.library library/dependency.

In the blink of an eye, summer has passed. I don’t know about you, but I’m ready for things to get back to “normal” after 10 weeks of events and travel, personal and professional, starting with high school graduation and finishing with college move-in.

Amidst all that, I had three speaking engagements as mentioned in an earlier post. Three different talks, delivered in very different places - putting it all together was more work than I’d anticipated.

T-SQL Tuesday is a monthly blog party hosted by a different community member each month. This month, John Sterrett (blog) asks us:

What are you doing, or what can we do to encourage younger people to get involved in the SQL community while increasing the number of younger speakers?