A tweet (since deleted) showed up in the dbatools Slack channel Friday afternoon.

My first thought was “huh? John (twitter) hadn’t kicked code in previously? I thought he had.” Once I was over that, I reflected a bit on what John wrote here, and was reminded of how I felt when I started helping out with dbatools.

It’s similar to Impostor Syndrome - I felt like I wasn’t doing much, small things here and there, in large part “just” documentation cleanup. The feeling that I was just throwing changes into the codebase just for the sake of making changes. It took me a couple of months and talking to several people before I understood that what I was doing was useful to someone other than myself and internalized what I was hearing.

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. But easy because there are a

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 only used it to watch a couple episodes of Stranger Things on the plane. The iPhone astounded me with its battery life. After charging overnight, it still had 30% left on it at 4:30 PM, even with heavy usage. Even better, it charged off the Anker battery pack fast- I was back up to 90% or better in an hour or less, much faster than I’ve experienced with other devices. This allowed me to top up the battery in the final session/event each afternoon and roam the city for the evening, comfortable that I had enough juice to last me until I returned to the hotel.

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. I was warned that the contents of this instance had been moved once before and it resulted in over a week of work and a bunch of trouble. I can’t speculate on why this was as I wasn’t there to see it, but I wasn’t going to let that happen on my watch. So, with equal parts hubris and stubbornness (and a dash of naïveté), I dove in. We have the technology. We will migrate this thing.

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. Check ’em out:

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. But we had an additional requirement - the configuration needed to match production as closely as possible, more than our current test instance. Of course, I reached for PowerShell and dbatools.

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? See above.

I’ve recently started contributing to the dbatools project and it’s all done through GitHub. Prior to this, I’d never used git and GitHub for anything more than an offsite repository for my own small repositories (I’ve used Subversion for over a decade) and I never totally understood how it worked in a large collaborative project until this came along.

I’m putting this together here for my own reference and to hopefully write it up in a way that helps things “click” for some people who need that extra nudge to get into “aha!” territory. A number of the examples I’ve seen elsewhere have mixed the command-line and GUI clients, but the more I use git GUIs, the less I like them for the basic workflow. You only need to know a handful of commands to be productive and for that, the command line beats the GUI in my opinion.