PASS Summit: Planting Seeds of Knowledge

On the eve of this year’s PASS Summit, I find myself reflecting on my first Summit in 2012. My employer was generous enough to pay for not only Summit itself, but a pre-con session on Tuesday as well.

I was a developer with an interest in SQL Server and PowerShell at the time, not a DBA. Becoming a DBA wasn’t on my radar yet. Regardless, I used the opportunity to attend a full-day class on managing SQL Server with PowerShell, taught by Allen White (blog | twitter). One of the big focal points of the day was the SQL Server Management Objects, aka SMO.

What I learned that day wasn’t immediately usable in my day-to-day job. Parts of it flew way over my head at the time. But the seeds were planted. It’d be several years before I got to the point of really applying it. Initially, my application was limited to some development “DBA-lite” tasks and suggestions for our sysadmins.

After a job change to become a full-time DBA, I started using and then contributing to dbatools, which uses SMO heavily. That previous exposure to SMO proved very beneficial. dbatools provides a lot of functionality, but it doesn’t do “everything.” In my own scripts, I’ve used that knowledge of the SMO object methods and properties to extend that functionality.

As I pore over this year’s schedule, I remind myself and ask you to consider not just what’s applicable to your present work and environment. Catch some sessions just to see what else is out there, or what’s coming. It’ll open doors for you in the future. Being informed about a wider range of topics will help you guide the conversation toward better solutions in the future. You don’t have to become a master of the topic; just know that something exists, what it can be applied to (equally valuable: where it won’t apply), and where to start gathering information if the solution is worth pursuing.