automation

Processing SQL Saturday Raffle Tickets with PowerShell

Andy Levy
Every year, I spend the Sunday after SQL Saturday Rochester scanning & processing raffle tickets for our wonderful sponsors. Here’s how the system works: Attendees get tickets (one ticket per sponsor) with their name, the sponsors name, and a QR code on them The QR codes represents a URI, unique to the combination of event, attendee and sponsor. Attendees drop their tickets in a box to enter the sponsor’s raffle prize drawing When the URI from the QR code is accessed, it registers in the SQL Saturday system Organizers run a report for each sponsor that includes the contact info of all attendees who dropped off a raffle ticket, then email the report to the sponsor It works pretty well, but the hangup is that most QR scanners will open your web browser (or prompt you to open it) to the URL on each scan.

My First Migration with dbatools

Andy Levy
I’ve been a proponent of dbatools for close to a year now and even contributed to the project, but surprisingly haven’t been a heavy user of it. Mostly due to a lack of opportunity. I’m aware of many of the functions by virtue of working on the built-in documentation and following the project and presentations about it. So when the need arose to move a development/test instance of SQL Server from a VM onto a physical server, I knew exactly what I wanted to do.

SQL New Blogger Digest - Week 2

Andy Levy
I didn’t intend for last week’s digest to also be my post for week two of the challenge, but life got in the way and I wasn’t able to complete the post that I really wanted in time. So, that post will be written much earlier in week three and completed well ahead of the deadline. Here are the posts collected from week two of the SQL New Blogger Challenge. It’s been compiled the same way last week’s was.

SQL New Blogger Challenge Weekly Digest

Andy Levy
Watching all of the tweets as people posted their first entries in the SQL New Blogger Challenge earlier this week, I quickly realized that keeping up was going to be a challenge of its own. Fortunately, there are ways to reign it in. My first stop was IFTTT (If This Then That). IFTTT allows you to create simple “recipes” to watch for specific events/conditions, then perform an action. They have over 175 “channels” to choose from, each of which has one or more triggers (events) and actions.