Consider this the outtakes from my previous post about speaking at SQL Saturday.

It took a while for me to build up the courage to finally get up in the front of a room at SQL Saturday. As I mentioned in my prior post, I did quite a bit of studying of other peoples’ sessions, read peoples’ studies of other peoples’ sessions (Grant Fritchey’s “Speaker of the Month” series) and talked to a few people at the speakers’ dinner. Here are a few of the key things I learned which put me more at ease.

That is the first and last Katy Perry reference you will find on this blog or anywhere else in my life.

Last weekend I spoke at the 4th edition of my “home” SQL Saturday, SQL Saturday #383. This was the end of a path that started four years ago, and the beginning of an exciting new one.

About four years ago, I was introduced to PASS. It didn’t take long for people to start talking to me about public speaking. I went to my first-ever SQL Saturday, and kept thinking to myself “I could never do that.” Then I was given the opportunity to attend PASS Summit 2012 and was hooked on the PASS community - SQL Family. I stepped onto the floor at the convention center and felt comfortable immediately. I think my exact words when I called home that evening were “I’m home. I found my people.” Mid-Summit, in a 10-minute conversation with a chapter leader, I was told “you should speak at one of my user group meetings.”

Slides & demos from my SQL Saturday Rochester presentation “Easing into Scripting with Windows PowerShell” have been posted on the SQL Saturday site.

Thank you to everyone who came out for my session and all of SQL Saturday!

I’ll be presenting my session Easing into Scripting with Windows PowerShell this Saturday, May 16th at SQL Saturday Rochester.

SQL Saturday is a free, all-day event for learning about SQL Server and related technologies, and networking with like-minded professionals in the region.

In addition to speaking, I’ll be tweeting out live updates all day long and posting pictures to both Instagram and Twitter. Watch for the hashtag #sqlsatroc (links to searches on both services).

This week marks the end of Ed Leighton-Dick’s New Blogger Challenge. It’s terrific seeing everyone sticking with the challenge all month and I’m looking forward to catching up with all the posts. Great job, everyone! Keep going!

Author	Post
@MtnDBA	[#SQLNewBlogger Week 4 – My 1st SQLSaturday session
@Lance_LT	[“MongoDB is the WORST!”
@ceedubvee	A Insider’s View of the Autism Spectrum: Autism and Information Technology: Big Data for Diagnosis
@Jorriss	A Podcast Is Born
@toddkleinhans	[A Tale of SQL Server Disk Space Trials and Tribulations
@arrowdrive	Anders On SQL: First “real” job with SQL.
@arrowdrive	Anders On SQL: Stupid Stuff I have done. 2/?. Sometimes even a dev server is not a good dev environment
@way0utwest	[April Blogger Challenge 4–Filtered Index Limitations
@ALevyInROC	[Are You Backing Everything Up?
@DesertIsleSQL	[Azure Data Lake: Why you might want one
@EdDebug	[BIML is better even for simple packages
@tpet1433	Corruption – The Denmark of SQL Instances – Tim Peters
@eleightondick	[Creating a Self-Contained Multi-Subnet Test Environment, Part II – Adding a Domain Controller
@MattBatalon	[Creating an Azure SQL Database
@pshore73	[Database on the Move – Part I
@pmpjr	[Do you wanna build a cluster?!
@DwainCSQL	[Excel in T-SQL Part 1 – HARMEAN, GEOMEAN and FREQUENCY
@AalamRangi	[Gotcha – SSIS ImportExport Wizard Can Kill Your Diagrams
@toddkleinhans	[How Do Blind People Use SQL Server?
@DBAFromTheCold	[In-Memory OLTP: Part 4 – Native Compilation
@AaronBertrand	It’s a Harsh Reality - Listen Up - SQL Sentry Team Blog
@GuruArthur	Looking back at April - Arthur Baan
@nocentino	Moving SQL Server data between filegroups - Part 2 - The implementation - Centino Systems Blog
@MyHumbleSQLTips	My Humble SQL Tips: Tracking Query Plan Changes
@m82labs	Reduce SQL Agent Job Overlaps · m82labs
@fade2blackuk	Rob Sewell on Twitter: “Instances and Ports with PowerShell http://t.co/kwN2KwVDOS”
@DwainCSQL	[Ruminations on Writing Great T-SQL
@sqlsanctum	[Security of PWDCOMPARE and SQL Hashing
@Pittfurg	SQL Server Backup and Restores with PowerShell Part 1: Setting up - Port 1433
@cjsommer	[Using PowerShell to Export SQL Data to CSV. How well does it perform?
@gorandalf	[Using SSIS Lookup Transformation in ETL Packages
@nicharsh	Words on Words: 5 Books That Will Improve Your Writing

We hear the common refrain among DBAs all the time. Back up your data! Test your restores! If you can’t restore the backup, it’s worthless. And yes, absolutely, you have to back up your databases - your job, and the company, depend upon it.

But are you backing everything up?

Saturday night was an ordinary night. It was getting late, and I was about to put my computer to sleep so I could do likewise. Suddenly, everything on my screen was replaced with a very nice message telling me that something had gone wrong and my computer needed to be restarted.

Here are the posts collected from week three of the SQL New Blogger Challenge. It’s been compiled the same way previous weeks’ posts were. Everyone’s doing a great job keeping up with the challenge!

Author	Post
@MtnDBA	[#SQLNewBlogger Week 3 – PowerShell Aliases
@ceedubvee	A Insider’s View of the Autism Spectrum: Autism and Information Technology: New Efforts for Kids to Code
@arrowdrive	Anders On SQL: Stupid Stuff I have done. 2/?. Sometimes even a dev server is not a good dev environment
@way0utwest	[April Blogger Challenge 3 – Filtered Indexes
@eleightondick	[Creating a Self-Contained Multi-Subnet Test Environment, Part I – Networking
@ceedubvee	[Empower Individuals With Autism Through Coding
@MattBatalon	[EXCEPT and INTERSECT…
@cjsommer	[Follow the yellow brick what? My road to public speaking.
@DBAFromTheCold	[In-Memory OLTP: Part 3 – Checkpoints
@MattBatalon	[Introduction to Windowing Functions
@nocentino	Moving SQL Server data between filegroups - Part 1 - Database Structures - Centino Systems Blog
@Lance_LT	[My first year as a speaker
@MyHumbleSQLTips	My Humble SQL Tips: Tracking Page Splits
@ALevyInROC	Padding Fields for Fixed-Position Data Formats
@tpet1433	Sir-Auto-Completes-A-Lot a.k.a. how to break IntelliSense, SQL Prompt and SQL Complete – Tim Peters
@pmpjr	[stats, yeah stats.
@DwainCSQL	[Stupid T-SQL Tricks – Part 3: A Zodiacal SQL
@cathrinew	Table Partitioning in SQL Server - Partition Switching - Cathrine Wilhelmsen
@gorandalf	[The MERGE Statement – One Statement for INSERT, UPDATE and DELETE
@SQLJudo	[The Road to SQL Server 2014 MCSE
@GGreggB	[T-SQL Tuesday #65: FMT_ONLY Replacements
@AalamRangi	[What is the RetainSameConnection Property of OLEDB Connection in SSIS?
@EdDebug	[What Permissions do I need to generate a deploy script with SSDT?
@_KenWilson	[Windowing using OFFSET-FETCH
@DesertIsleSQL	What Does Analytics Mean?
@DesertIsleSQL	Azure ML, SSIS and the Modern Data Warehouse
@DesertIsleSQL	Musing about Microsoft’s Acquisition of DataZen and Power BI
@GuruArthur	Check for database files not in default location

Fixed-position data formats will seemingly be with us forever. Despite the relative ease of parsing CSV (or other delimited formats), or even XML, many data exchanges require a fixed-position input. Characters 1-10 are X, characters 11-15 are Y and if the source data is fewer than 5 characters, we have to left-pad with a filler character, etc. When you’re accustomed to working with data that says what it means and means what it says, having to add “extra fluff” like left-padding your integers with a half-dozen zeroes can be a hassle.

I didn’t intend for last week’s digest to also be my post for week two of the challenge, but life got in the way and I wasn’t able to complete the post that I really wanted in time. So, that post will be written much earlier in week three and completed well ahead of the deadline.

Here are the posts collected from week two of the SQL New Blogger Challenge. It’s been compiled the same way last week’s was.

Watching all of the tweets as people posted their first entries in the SQL New Blogger Challenge earlier this week, I quickly realized that keeping up was going to be a challenge of its own. Fortunately, there are ways to reign it in.

My first stop was IFTTT (If This Then That). IFTTT allows you to create simple “recipes” to watch for specific events/conditions, then perform an action. They have over 175 “channels” to choose from, each of which has one or more triggers (events) and actions. I have IFTTT linked to both my Google and Twitter accounts, which allowed me to create a recipe which watches Twitter for the #sqlnewblogger hashtag, and writes any tweets that match it to a spreadsheet on my Google Drive account (I’ll make the spreadsheet public for now, why not?).