I am very happy to announce that SQL Saturday returns to Rochester, NY on March 24, 2018. This is the Flour/Flower City’s seventh SQL Saturday and SQL Saturday #723 overall. This is a little earlier than in years past due to the scheduling of other SQL Saturdays as well as the availability of our venue and key people, and I can’t wait to see how this change works out. SQL Saturday is a free one-day event for anyone working with the Microsoft data platform.

This tweet showed up in the dbatools Slack channel Friday afternoon. Just did my first Pull Request to "contribute" to @psdbatools. Granted, the code change was a single line of code that was spoon-fed to me... but it's still my 1st PR ever! Life. Changed. Special thanks to @cl for the spoon, and @wsmelton for the PR assistance. :) #dbatools — John G Hohengarten #BlackLivesMatter (@wsuhoey) November 17, 2017 My first thought was “huh?

It’s time for T-SQL Tuesday and this month’s edition is hosted by Ewald Cress (blog|twitter). It’s non-technical this month because we’re all recovering from PASS Summit. Ewald asks us to: give a shout-out to people (well-known or otherwise) who have made a meaningful contribution to your life in the world of data. This post is both difficult and easy. Difficult because there are so many people in the community whom I’ve learned from.

Continuing my series of posts about my PASS Summit 2017 experience. This is about gadgets/gear I brought & software I used, the gadgets I saw around the convention center, and then a little about the hardware & software that was demoed. Personal Gadgets I only brought three gadgets, plus their support items: iPhone 8 iPad Air 2 Apple Watch Series 3 4-port Anker wall charger Anker 15K mAH battery pack 2x Lightning cable (for the iPhone & iPad), 1x Micro-USB cable (to charge the battery pack), 1X Apple Watch charge cord For the amount I used the iPad, I wish I had left it home.

I registered for Summit about a month before getting actively involved in the dbatools project, so when I saw the team was running a pre-con and I was going to meet them, I was pretty excited. It was amazing getting to meet and hang out with Chrissy, Rob, CK, Shane, Jess, John, Shawn, Aaron, Ben, Kiril, Shane, and Drew (sorry if I forgot anyone!), even if it was only for a moment.

PASS Summit 2017 is only a week away and to say I’m excited about it would be an understatement. This will be my third trip to the epic gathering of SQL Server and Microsoft data platform professionals and each time, it gets better and better. Not only is this a time for learning and networking, it’s a giant #sqlfamily reunion. The list of people I’m excited to see is long, both people I’ve known for a while and new friends I’ve only spoken with online.

I’ve been a proponent of dbatools for close to a year now and even contributed to the project, but surprisingly haven’t been a heavy user of it. Mostly due to a lack of opportunity. I’m aware of many of the functions by virtue of working on the built-in documentation and following the project and presentations about it. So when the need arose to move a development/test instance of SQL Server from a VM onto a physical server, I knew exactly what I wanted to do.

One of the (many) fun things to do at PASS Summit is to check out the ribbons people have attached to their badges. Some are witty or goofy, others informational, others technical, and still more that let you express how you identify with a community within the community. To celebrate dbatools and the awesome team & community around it, two limited edition badges will be available from/distributed by me and a handful of other folks all week at Summit.

This month’s T-SQL Tuesday is hosted by Rob Sewell and he’s posed the following question: What are you going to automate today with PowerShell? I’m cheating a little bit in that this is something I did a couple weeks ago, but it was immensely helpful. I’d been working on building out a new instance to migrate our test databases onto, but the developers had an urgent need to do some testing in isolation so they “borrowed” that new instance.

While working on an enhancement to dbatools, I had a need to stash a local copy of a file downloaded from the internet, but in a safe place that I could reasonably expect to be safe from accidental deletion. User’s home directory? Maybe, but it’ll be clutter, the user might see it appear and fear that they’ve got malware. And likely deleted ina “cleanup” effort. Create my own directory somewhere on the file system?