Elsewhere

Fairly short post here. Due to the recent events around Twitter (which I will not get into), I’m making an effort to reduce or completely cease my activity on that platform. My Contact page has been updated with all of the below accounts/sites.

A little while ago, Ray Kim (blog | twitter) asked a few folks who organize SQL Saturday events a few questions for his blog. The results are in and he’s compiled them all into one big post.

Check it out: What goes into organizing a #SQLSaturday? From the words of #SQLFamily

Last week (as I write this), Kevin Hill (blog | twitter) released the first episode of his new podcast Data Bits. I enjoyed listening to it and said “hey bud, if you need a guest sometime down the line, give me a shout!”

Well, “sometime down the line” turned out to be just a few days, and we recorded on the evening of March 4th amid a little craziness in both our houses. I always enjoy catching up with Kevin and our hour-long conversation could easily have been three or four. We talked tech, not tech, career stuff, and of course #SQLFamily.

I presented a few times in 2019, and I’m starting off 2020 with several as well. Here’s what’s on the schedule for Q1.

• 2020-01-06 Yep, ISO8601 format. That’s how I roll. - I’ll be giving a lightning talk at work titled “What Does a Database Administrator Do, Anyway?” This one isn’t open to the general public (though I might tweak it for use at community events), but The Bobs and “It Depends” both make an appearance in the deck.
• 2020-02-01 - I’m thrilled to announce that I’ll be presenting Keys to a Healthy Relationship with SQL Server at SQL Saturday Cleveland. This is incredibly exciting while at the same time, nerve-wracking. Cleveland is home to quite a few people who I look up to in the SQL Server community, and being selected to speak there is an honor. At the same time, getting up in front of those same folks…I have to keep reminding myself that they’re my friends, they want me to succeed, and they’re in my corner.
• 2020-03-27 - I will be presenting Keys to a Healthy Relationship with SQL Server via webinar for SQL Professionals of Chattanooga. I met Heather Durham (twitter), one of the group organizers, at PASS Summit 2019, asked if the group would be open to me presenting remotely for them, and a few weeks later we were setting things up! Travel isn’t always easy for me, so if this works well hopefully I can add more presentations to my schedule.

That’s what’s booked so far for 2020. I’m hoping to submit sessions to a few more SQL Saturdays later in the year. Once I get another session worked out I’ll be presenting that (those? we shall see…) at our local user group and hopefully adding them to my SQL Saturday submissions. I’m shooting for couple more lightning talks and lunch & learns at work as well!

Carlos Chacon (twitter) was kind enough to have me back on the SQL Data Partners Podcast to talk about my experiences with managing 8000 databases on a single instance and upgrading to SQL Server 2016. He, Kevin Feasel (blog | twitter) & I had a great conversation in which I may have gushed a bit about dbatools. Then we wrapped up with the SQLFamily questions as we didn’t do them on my previous appearance last year.

It’s official! I will be speaking at the inaugural PowerHour online lightning demo event on Tuesday, August 21st at 2200 UTC. I’ll be demoing Better, Safer SQL Queries from PowerShell.

If you’re working with SQL Server from PowerShell, either as a DBA, analyst, or anyone else running queries, you’ve probably used Invoke-SqlCmd. But depending on how you’re building your queries, this can be error-prone or a huge security exposure! With the help of the dbatools module, I’ll show you how to write and run these queries better and safer - and make them easier to work into your scripts to boot.

A couple weeks ago Carlos L. Cachon (blog|twitter) put out a call on Twitter looking for SQL Saturday organizers to join him on the SQL Data Partners Podcast. When I signed on to record, I learned that Chris Hyde (blog|twitter) and Eugene Meindinger (blog|twitter) were joining us. I’ve met and spoken with all three previously, so it was easy talking to everyone and I thought the conversation flowed well.

Check out SQL Data Partners Podcast Episode 126: SQLSaturday Edition.

I wrote a post over on the dbatools website about how to get involved with improving comment-based help

Working on the CBH is a great way to get started with the dbatools project, even (especially) if you’re not a PowerShell expert or MVP-level DBA. Getting everything clean and consistent in the CBH is an important step on the road to 1.0. Along the way, you’ll pick up on how dbatools is put together, discover functions that you can use in your day-to-day work, and get a feel for PowerShell best practices. You will learn from this experience!