In addition to being an amazing opportunity for both technical and professional development, PASS Summit is a #sqlfamily reunion and a huge networking event. Catching up with old friends, meeting new ones, finding out who’s doing what with which technologies, etc.

This is one of the few times each year I’m anything even approaching a social butterfly and I’ve had one or two people ask about my schedule so we can plan meetups. Summit is so huge that you have to plan these things. You can’t count on randomly bumping into people around the convention center or city, and if you happen to spot someone you really want to meet, you have to take advantage of that opportunity the first time it presents itself.

Welcome to the new home of my blog! I’ve had this domain for over a year but with PASS Summit 2018 coming up soon I decided it was time to make the move official.

I’ve brought all the content over from the old site but all new content will be appearing here. I’ll throw a new coat of paint on at some point just to freshen things up.

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. But as Mike Tyson famously said, everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.

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). After ironing out a few glitches, we got everyone in the right place and kicked off the broadcast. Everything ran very smoothly, especially considering the number of people involved - Michael and Warren F. (blog|twitter) did a terrific job of orchestrating everything.

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. Here come the Boy Scouts chanting “Be Prepared!”

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. In production, we manage several thousand databases which sit behind about as many websites.

A few weeks ago, I teased good news.

just got some good news. can’t wait to share it

• Tweet by me at Fri Jul 20 16:42:28 +0000 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!

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. In production, we manage several thousand databases which sit behind about as many websites.