This month’s T-SQL Tuesday comes from Shane O’Neill (blog | twitter). He starts us off with this: Dipping into the Cookie Jar is about when the going gets tough and you don’t think you can handle anymore, then you think back about your accomplishments and take some sustenance from them. You dip back into that cookie jar and use whatever energy that provides to keep going. So tell me about a time when you had an accomplishment that can keep you going.

Probably a bit late getting this posted but I will be speaking at the March 5, 2019 meeting of the Rochester SQL Server User group (RSVP link). I don’t have a great title or abstract for the talk (yet!), but here’s the gist: The relationship between DBAs and developers has a long history with challenging moments. Some developers see DBAs as roadblocks. Some DBAs see developers as rogues bent on destroying the database server’s performance.

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.

I was recently working on a PowerShell script to set up some new databases for my users and found myself writing the same things over and over again. 1 2 3 Invoke-DbaQuery -SqlInstance MyServer -Database $SrcDB -Query "select field1 from table..."; Invoke-DbaQuery -SqlInstance MyServer -Database $DstDB -Query "update table..."; Invoke-DbaQuery -SqlInstance MyServer -Database $DstDB -Query "insert into table..."; By the 4th Invoke-DbaQuery, I found myself thinking “this repetitive typing kind of sucks.

Way back in August, Matt Cushing (blog|twitter) was preparing to teach and asked for a list of “what do you wish you’d known when you started” items that he could present to his students. I threw a barrage of Twitter direct messages at him and he incorporated much of it into his post, but I thought it was worth posting here as well. Most of these aren’t technical “I wish I understood the nuances of filtered indexes” type of thing.

Like many folks using Wordpress, I post a tweet each time I publish a blog entry and that’s done automatically by Wordpress. In the Wordpress Classic Editor, there was a section in the sidebar next to the post to select where the post was publicized (Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.) and customize the accompanying text. By default, the message is just the post’s title, but I like to add in hashtags when appropriate so being able to edit that text is important to me.

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.

As we open 2019, I thought I’d take a moment to reflect on the past year. Blogging 2018 was my biggest year of blogging yet! I published 28 posts and got more traffic than I ever thought possible, thanks in no small part to being linked by Brent Ozar’s (blog|twitter) newsletter. I also moved my blog to its own domain (which you’re looking at now), with independent hosting. I’d been putting this off for over a year.