It’s early September, which means it’s time for T-SQL Tuesday! This month’s topic comes from Kevin Chant (blog | twitter). Our mission, should we choose to accept it (click the image to see the original invite):
Recently I’ve had to submit suggestions to Microsoft about Azure DevOps and SQL Server.
I will admit a couple of the suggestions had certainly been in my head for a while. In fact, I wish I had suggested them sooner.
This is Part 3 in a three-part series. Please see Part 1 and Part 2 for more.
What does your average day look like?
I’m going to punt to my “A Day in the Life” series here.
When you started, did you know what your position was going to look like 1 month, 6 months, 1 year, 5 years from then? How accurate has that been so far?
I’ve only been at my current job for about 2 1/2 years, but I can speak to the shorter intervals.
This is Part 2 of a series. Please see [Part 1]/2019/09/03/qa-dealing-with-thousands-of-databases/) for the background and more.
What is the most unexpected experience you’ve had in this position?
I have two answers to this question.
I write more dynamic SQL in any given week than I had previously in my career - all years combined!
Many DBAs deal with issues around parameter sniffing and plans being stuck in cache that don’t work well for a number of their requests as a result.
This is part one of a three-part series.
I’ve mentioned in various places, including in blog posts on occasion, that my production SQL Server instance hosts several thousand (nearly 9000 as of this writing) databases. People are usually surprised to hear this and it often leads to interesting conversation.
Jon Shaulis (blog | twitter) asked me on Twitter recently:
@ALevyInROC Have you written before about your experience managing thousands of databases by chance?
Announced at DataGrillen 2019 today, the amazing dbatools PowerShell module has officially released version 1.0. This is a tremendous milestone for the best Open Source project built for data professionals.
What started out as a single PowerShell script for migrating SQL Server instances in Chrissy LeMaire’s (blog | twitter) datacenter has become the most important and comprehensive Open Source toolkit for SQL Server database administrators and developers. Whether you’re managing one server or one thousand, this module is an indispensable tool which will make your day more productive and less error-prone.
This month’s T-SQL Tuesday comes from Todd Kleinhans (blog | twitter) who wants to know what we’re doing with databases outside of work.
I’m curious- outside of work and learning, what do you personally use databases for? Tracking books you have, recipes, collections, etc? While it can be said using databases for personal use could be either overkill or a hammer in search of nails on the other hand, it is exactly what they are for- storing data.
By now many of us have upgraded from SQL Server 2008R2 and we’re on the “regular Cumulative Updates” train now. For the rest, it’ll (hopefully) happen soon. And since we want a long runway, we’re upgrading to SQL Server 2016 or 2017. Current software! New features! Mainstream support! But…there’s a catch.
Staying current DBAs & sysadmins don’t want to fall too far behind on patching for a variety of reasons. It used to be that monthly patch cycles were primarily for Windows Server.
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.
In my previous post, I outlined the preparations we undertook to migrate a large SQL Server 2008R2 instance to SQL Server 2016. This post details migration day.
Final Prep We completed our nightly backups as usual on Friday night, so when I arrived Saturday I kicked off a final differential backup to catch any overnight changes. We’ve multi-threaded Ola’s backup script by creating multiple jobs and I started them all at once with (of course) PowerShell.
A bit over a year ago, I blogged about my experience migrating a test SQL Server instance from a VM to a physical machine with a little help from my friends. That migration went well and the instance has been running trouble-free ever since. But it’s small potatoes. A modest instance, it’s only about 5% the size of production. With SQL Server 2008R2’s EOL looming, it was time to migrate production to SQL Server 2016.