Earlier this year, I embarked on a bit of a project to tidy up the indexes in a sizeable database. This database has over 900 tables, and there are quite a few indexes which I have long suspected don’t need to exist for a variety of reasons. Some indexes are redundant, others don’t get used, still others could be combined into a single index. By reducing the number of indexes, we can improve write performance in the database, and the size of the database itself. But we have to do it carefully.

T-SQL Tuesday is a monthly blog party hosted by a different community member each month. This month, Kevin Feasel (blog | twitter) asks us about job interview questions.

What is your favorite job interview question? There’s a lot of latitude in how you answer this, and as a spoiler, that’s the type of question I like a lot.

I will be presenting Answering the Auditor’s Call with Automation at two upcoming events, one virtual and one in-person.

1. DBA Fundamentals Virtual User Group Tuesday, April 9 2024 at Noon EDT
2. Capital Area SQL Server User Group on Monday, May 13th at 5:30 PM.

As DBAs, we’re called on regularly to produce documentation for security & compliance audits. Being able to show who has what level of access to an instance is the minimum, but we’re often asked for more. Collecting this information and compiling it into something usable by auditors could take you hours or even days. But with automation, you can pull it all together in a matter of minutes while you’re getting that second cup of coffee from the kitchen.

T-SQL Tuesday is a monthly blog party hosted by a different community member each month. I missed out on January 2024’s edition because I didn’t think I had anything good to talk about, but it suddenly hit me in February so…retroactive T-SQL Tuesday!

For January 2024, Reitse Eskens (blog | twitter) prompts us to talk about our learnings from abandoned or failed projects.

the main intent of this blog is to trigger your stories; what projects did you abandon but learn a lot from OR what’s your favourite learning from a failure.

The holidays have passed and it’s a new year. You probably have a gift card or two and haven’t decided how to use it yet. Allow me to help:

Buy that fancy keyboard you’ve been coveting. Yes, the $100+ model. And get the good mouse/trackball while you’re at it. Just do it.

If you’re reading this, you’re probably a “knowledge worker”, developer, data wrangler, or technical writer. You spend hours every day at your computer, hammering away at the keyboard. Why are you still using that $10 membrane keyboard and $5 corded mouse that the company has a 10-year stockpiles of?

As PASS Summit approaches this week, I’m re-reviewing my evaluations from SQL Saturday Boston and I’d like to give feedback about feedback.

Why Feedback?

Both speakers and event organizers depend upon getting feedback about every session delivered at SQL Saturday, Data Saturday, PASS Summit, or any of the user groups (in-person or virtual). This feedback is valuable to speakers and event organizers alike.

• For speakers, it helps us understand if we’re doing OK when we’re in front of the room, but more importantly we want to know what we can do better.
• For event organizers, it’s helpful in understanding what content attendees want to see. As a former event organizer and user group leader, I’ve even used that feedback to say “hey, we should invite this person to speak at a future meeting.”

Ratings on a scale of 1-5 are okay, but when you’re looking at product reviews on Amazon you aren’t just look at the stars, are you? The written reviews are what matter most when you’re making a decision about garden hoses or cheese graters. This is your opportunity to tell the speaker what works in their presentation and what doesn’t. This is information that can’t be conveyed via 4 stars or an emoji. We need actionable feedback.

All week, my phone has been reminding me (via photo memories) of the amazing experience I had at PASS Summit 2017. This can mean only one thing - PASS Summit 2023 is less than two weeks away!

I’ve written a lot about Summit in the past and many of the posts I’ve written about getting ready are still applicable today, so go check those out too.

Content and Scheduling

As always PASS Summit is delivering a ton of amazing content - an embarrassment of riches! And the topics are getting more and more diverse every year. Which is excellent because in the coming year(s) I, like many data professionals, will be asked to work across a variety of tools and platforms and not just the handful we’ve been using for a decade or more.

First Things First

Thank you to everyone who attended my session “Answering the Automator’s Call with Automation.” My slide deck and demo code are now available on my Github.. This was a new session and I’m pretty happy with how it worked out. I wasn’t sure if it would “land,” even after doing my run-throughs at home. Now that I’ve delivered the material to real people and had a conversation or two about it with folks, I’m feeling much more confident.

I’m happy to announce that I will be speaking at SQL Saturday Boston on October 14th, 2023. This year’s session is Answering the Auditor’s Call with Automation

As DBAs, we’re called on regularly to produce documentation for security & compliance audits. Being able to show who has what level of access to an instance is the minimum, but we’re often asked for more. Collecting this information and compiling it into something usable by auditors could take you hours or even days. But with automation, you can pull it all together in a matter of minutes while you’re getting that second cup of coffee from the kitchen.

Last week I wrote about our FRC team, asking for support in in the form of a cheering section. Today, I’m asking for more assistance for these amazing students.

Things went better than expected at the Finger Lakes Regional event and TAN[X] 3003 was part of the winning alliance. This means that we earned an invitation to the 2023 World Championships. You can watch all of our qualification and playoff matches via YouTube links on The Blue Alliance. They also appeared in a local news segment about the event.