The Prompt In July, Brent Ozar (blog | twitter) asked us to make September Community Tools Awareness Month.
In September, I want you to improve community knowledge about one free tool that you rely on every week in order to get your job done.
I’m sure it will come as no surprise to readers of this blog, but I’m going to select the amazing PowerShell module dbatools.
dbatools Is for Everyone Despite what the name may imply, dbatools is a valuable toolkit for anyone who needs to interact with SQL Server.
Note: I originally wrote this a few years ago but never posted it. It resurfaced when I migrated the blog so it’s being posted now.
After watching Kevin Kline’s (blog | twitter) webinar Essential Tasks to a Successful Cloud Migration, I downloaded the T-SQL scripts to run them against some of my databases. One of the included queries identifies tables with forwarded fetches and right on top of the list was a table with over 1.6 billion forwarded fetches in the roughly 3 weeks since the instance was last restarted.
A collection of the resources mentioned in my PASS Data Community Summit session Backup Basics with PowerShell and dbatools, including bonus content!
Over the summer, I spent some (a lot of) time working on updates to a script at work which runs multiple processes in parallel. Everything seemed to work OK for a while, but then everything broke. It broke right around the time dbatools 1.1 dropped, so I started thinking that something must have changed there. As it turns out, it was entirely my fault and I hope this post will help you avoid the same trap.
I am thrilled to announce that I will be speaking at this year’s PASS Data Community Summit! This year’s event runs November 8th through 12th. I am thrilled to announce that I will be speaking at this year’s PASS Data Community Summit!
For years, I thought that native backups of databases using Transparent Data Encryption (TDE) couldn’t be compressed. Between TDE being limited to Enterprise Edition until SQL Server 2019 and my own lack of experience with TDE in prior positions, I hadn’t really experimented with this myself. Some people have even gone so far as to skip compression in their backup jobs for TDE-enabled databases because there’s no need to burn those CPU cycles if you won’t get any compression, right?
T-SQL Tuesday is a monthly blog party hosted by a different community member each month, and this month Brent Ozar (blog | twitter) asks us to talk about data types.
Your mission: write a blog post about your favorite data type, and schedule it for next Tuesday, March 9.
Mad about money? Feverish about float? Tell us what you use your favorite data type for, and what people need to know before they get started using it.
While presenting Backup Basics with PowerShell and dbatools at ONDT, I mentioned a caveat with the -ReplaceExisting switch for Install-DbaMaintenanceSolution. This switch drops all of the objects installed by the Maintenance Solution, including the CommandLog table. If you use that table to produce evidence that the various maintenance tasks are being performed on a regular basis or use it to track performance of those tasks over time, dropping that table presents a problem.
I got a merge a while back that included a change I wasn’t expecting from one of my developers. All they were doing was renaming a column on a table. We had names settled a while ago. What’s up with that?
Turns out, when I created the table, I named one of the fields BrithYear. This merge request corrected it to BirthYear. The misspelling slipped past me, past everyone else, it was only discovered because when this developer was building the a new query into their code, they spelled the field as one would expect, and the query threw an error.
I had the honor of presenting a new session, Backup Basics with PowerShell and dbatools, at the first Ohio North Database Training meeting this evening. Thank you to the group leaders for the opportunity and to everyone who attended.
Because this was both a brand new session and an attempt at a new way of delivering the presentation, I had a couple tech glitches but things went pretty well once they were understood and ironed out.