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. Got something you want to show off? Log an issue using the template!

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.

This week, I had the opportunity to be the moderator for Joseph Barth’s (blog|twitter) 24 Hours of PASS Summit Preview session about Azure Data Factory V2. It was fun, easy, and I encourage you to sign up to do the same!

Throughout the year, PASS hosts a number of online learning events. 24 Hours of PASS and virtual chapter webinars being the most common/visible. And in each session, the presenter needs a little help managing questions and watching the clock so they can focus on delivering their great content. It’s pretty easy. You just:

I really enjoy my job. I became a full-time production DBA about 14 months ago and it has been an overwhelmingly positive move. I work for a good company and with a terrific group of people. Many days, I have to force myself to leave the office because I was so engrossed in a task and just didn’t want to set it aside.

But there’s something that not everyone might consider before taking on this job. If you have a partner, children, or both, taking a job as a production DBA is really a family decision.

Triggers can be really useful in your database but you have to be careful with them. We often use them to record history to a separate table (at least, until we can implement temporal tables) or keep track of when a record was last updated. It’s usually implemented via an AFTER UPDATE trigger.

Several times a day, I’m alerted by our monitoring suite that two processes were deadlocked. This is a (mostly) normal event, but one that we’d like to avoid if we can. More than a few times, I observed this pattern:

This week I had a user come to me asking about how fields were defined on a few tables he was using in writing some reports. Long story short, he’s been tasked with writing some new reports and updating existing ones, but he doesn’t have visibility to the database itself so he’s left with the “ok, let’s try this” approach and then reading error messages to debug when things go sideways. Very tedious.

Every year, I spend the Sunday after SQL Saturday Rochester scanning & processing raffle tickets for our wonderful sponsors. Here’s how the system works:

• Attendees get tickets (one ticket per sponsor) with their name, the sponsors name, and a QR code on them
• The QR codes represents a URI, unique to the combination of event, attendee and sponsor.
• Attendees drop their tickets in a box to enter the sponsor’s raffle prize drawing
• When the URI from the QR code is accessed, it registers in the SQL Saturday system
• Organizers run a report for each sponsor that includes the contact info of all attendees who dropped off a raffle ticket, then email the report to the sponsor

It works pretty well, but the hangup is that most QR scanners will open your web browser (or prompt you to open it) to the URL on each scan. For 150+ tickets, this takes a long time. Every year, I lament “oh, how I wish I could just scan these, collect the URLs into a nicely formatted file, and script this whole thing”.

A couple weeks ago Carlos L. Cachon (blog|twitter) put out a call on Twitter looking for SQL Saturday organizers to join him on the SQL Data Partners Podcast. When I signed on to record, I learned that Chris Hyde (blog|twitter) and Eugene Meindinger (blog|twitter) were joining us. I’ve met and spoken with all three previously, so it was easy talking to everyone and I thought the conversation flowed well.

Check out SQL Data Partners Podcast Episode 126: SQLSaturday Edition.

This month’s T-SQL Tuesday from Aaron Bertrand gives us a choice:

• Life beyond the technical in a search for what Drew with the Burdensome Name calls #sqlibrium
• Your own T-SQL bad habits

And I’ve got one, maybe two posts in progress on the first topic. Alas,

ironic that being swamped with work is blocking me from writing my #sqlibrium #TSQL2sday post

• Tweet by me at Mon Feb 12 21:30:53 +0000 2018

Thanks to Eugene Meidinger (blog|twitter) for nudging me in the direction of posting this. Ever since this month’s T-SQL Tuesday was announced, work and non-work has been a complete whirlwind and I have failed miserably at reaching sqlibrium.

I need a new social media profile picture.

That’s one of the most important (non-technical) conclusions I drew from my week at PASS Summit 2017. It seemed like everywhere I went, I heard “I didn’t recognize you without the hat!” The picture I use on Slack, Twitter and Instagram is the same one I use here on my About Me page. This photo was taken in 2014 at the West Bend, WI Cache Bash and it’s one of the few photos of myself that I actually like (harsh shadows aside). I nearly did bring The Hat with me, but decided against it as it’s big, heavy, and not really an “indoor” hat.