This month’s T-SQL Tuesday is hosted by Jeff Mlakar and he asks us to write about a project that went horribly wrong. My story isn’t really worthy of the name “death march” but it was a pretty rough project. The project started sometime in mid-2003. I was working as a web developer (Classic ASP) for an insurance company and they wanted to modernize the underwriting process with a web-based “workflow” application.

This is my third installment in a series responding to Steve Jones’s (blog|twitter) #SQLCareer challenge. I decided to jot down most of what I did through the day, filling a page and a half in a Field Notes notebook with timestamps and short reminders of what happened. For more, check out the #SQLCareer hashtag on Twitter. Background I chose to record this day because I was working from home as my car was in the shop and I thought I might get some bigger things done without the distractions of being in the office.

The first edition of the PSPowerHour is in the books and it looks like it was a big success. This one was dbatools-heavy but I chalk that up to the dbatools community having lots of free time because we’ve automated so many of our tasks :) Overall Impressions I signed in about half an hour ahead of the webcast and was the first one there. Shortly thereafter, I was joined by Michael Lombardi (twitter, then Jess Pomfret (blog|twitter) and Chrissy LeMaire (blog|twitter).

Kevin Hill (blog|twitter) posted a thought-provoking item on his blog last week about Disaster Recovery Plans. While I am in the 10% who perform DR tests for basic functionality on a regular basis, there’s a lot more to being prepared for disaster than just making sure you can get the databases back online. You really need to have a full-company business continuity plan (BCP), which your DR plan is an integral portion of.

This is my second installment in a series responding to Steve Jones’s (blog|twitter) #SQLCareer challenge. I decided to jot down most of what I did through the day, filling a page and a half in a Field Notes notebook with timestamps and short reminders of what happened. For more, check out the #SQLCareer hashtag on Twitter. Background I’m one of two DBAs in my company, and my colleague is (still) on holiday on the opposite side of the planet so I’m juggling everything – on-call, regular operations, consults with developers, you name it.

A few weeks ago, I teased good news. just got some good news. can't wait to share it — Andy Levy (@ALevyInROC) July 20, 2018 One person hypothesized that I’m joining Microsoft (it seems to be the thing to do lately) and another jumped to the conclusion that I must be pregnant. Both creative responses, but not quite correct. I’ll be at PASS Summit 2018! So much to do! Pick some sessions Make my checklist of #sqlfamily I need to see Find a way to pack lighter (I think the iPad will stay home this time) Up my selfie game Get back into shape for #sqlrun Print up some more dbatools ribbons Figure out the social media photo situation (see above, “Up my selfie game”) If you’re attending Summit, let’s meet up!

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.

This is my first installment in (I hope) a series responding to Steve Jones’s (blog|twitter) #SQLCareer challenge. I decided to jot down most of what I did through the day, filling a page and a half in a Field Notes notebook with timestamps and short reminders of what happened. For more, check out the #SQLCareer hashtag on Twitter. Background I’m one of two DBAs in my company, and my colleague is on holiday on the opposite side of the planet (literally) for a couple weeks so I’m juggling everything - on-call, regular operations, consults with developers, you name it.

Earlier this week, the PowerHour was announced. What is it? It’s kind of like a virtual user group. One hour, 6(ish) lightning demos (10 minutes or less), centered on PowerShell. All community-sourced and driven - anyone can submit a proposal for a demo and if accepted, you’ll be slotted into an available spot. They’ve already set up a YouTube Channel so you can either watch live or catch up later on, and the whole deal is being organized and managed through GitHub.

This month’s T-SQL Tuesday is hosted by Bert Wagner and he asks us to write about code we’ve written that we would hate to live without. First off, “hate” is a pretty strong word so let’s go with “code you couldn’t bear to live without”. The first bit of code I couldn’t live without is reviled in some circles. More often it’s misunderstood and lamented, or…well, I’ll just show it to you.