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.
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. The old Wordpress subdomain name was clunky and I don’t feel like it properly reflected the direction I’ve taken since setting it up. I’ve had a few bumps along the way which I can’t quite explain (and as a result, didn’t get a post out for New Year’s Eve as I’d hoped), but I’m enjoying the freedom of having my own domain and full control of what I do in managing the site.
In my previous post, I mentioned that I wasn’t checking the status of my RSJobs because I had logging built into my function. I originally tried to log out to plain text files with Out-File, but quickly hit a wall. In a multi-threaded script, attempting to write to the same text file from multiple threads results in collisions and waits at best, and outright failure at worse. Perplexed, I turned to the PowerShellHelp channel in the SQL Community Slack and asked for suggestions for thread-safe logging to text files.
PowerShell has had a native method for spawning multiple “threads” ever since I can remember, in the form of the *-Job functions. They work OK, but there are a couple downsides:
This combination will become an ugly mess if something spins out of control and you spawn dozens or hundreds of jobs. PowerShell jobs are better tailored to small-scale asynchronous background processing. You can wrap the functions to limit the number of concurrent jobs but again, there’s a lot of overhead involved in creating and tearing down jobs. Warren Frame created Invoke-Parallel, which uses runspaces (lighter-weight than jobs) and allows for throttling, but isn’t quite as full-featured as jobs are.
Matt (blog | twitter) is preparing for his first SQL Saturday presentation next weekend in Washington, DC. He’s asked:
I wanted to get an idea of some good, bad, and surprise experiences that people had at everything from a SQL Server User Group meeting to PASS Summit. Things you found out right before, during or even after that you were glad you did or wish you did.
SQL Saturdays are similar to PASS Summit, but much smaller in scope and budget. Most SQL Saturdays have a twitter hashtag; follow it before the event so you can get an idea of who’s attending and make plans to meet some of those people.
Last year at PASS Summit 2017, I heard a number of comments related to people not recognizing me without the hat in my social media photo/avatar. The linked post started and concluded with the notion that I needed to take a new photo.
That never happened. Instead, I embraced The Hat. And it was totally worth it. I got a bit of ribbing from folks early in the week but it was all friendly. Trying to meet up with people at various points in the week, I’d get messages like “I’m in (location), looking for your hat, where are you?” People introduced themselves when they spotted me doing my PASS Ambassador duties because they recognized the hat from my photo.
My album of people and events at Summit 2018. Somehow a number of photo opportunities were missed!
[foogallery id=“1880”]
@SQLMonkeyNYC asked on Twitter this morning:
Pat Phelan replied, suggesting that dbatools can do it, but after thinking on it for a bit and poking at a few functions, I realized that it’s not possible with a single function (yet). No worries. We can do it in three lines for now.
Malathi Mahadevan (blog|twitter) is hosting this month’s T-SQL Tuesday, a monthly blog party for the SQL Server community.
Malathi has asked us to:
Pick one thing you want to learn that is not SQL Server. Write down ways and means to learn it and add it as another skill to your resume. If you are already learning it or know it – explain how you got there and how it has helped you. Your experience may help many others looking for guidance on this.
On the eve of this year’s PASS Summit, I find myself reflecting on my first Summit in 2012. My employer was generous enough to pay for not only Summit itself, but a pre-con session on Tuesday as well.
I was a developer with an interest in SQL Server and PowerShell at the time, not a DBA. Becoming a DBA wasn’t on my radar yet. Regardless, I used the opportunity to attend a full-day class on managing SQL Server with PowerShell, taught by Allen White (blog | twitter). One of the big focal points of the day was the SQL Server Management Objects, aka SMO.