The Prompt In July, Brent Ozar (blog | twitter) asked us to make September Community Tools Awareness Month. In September, I want you to improve community knowledge about one free tool that you rely on every week in order to get your job done. I’m sure it will come as no surprise to readers of this blog, but I’m going to select the amazing PowerShell module dbatools. dbatools Is for Everyone Despite what the name may imply, dbatools is a valuable toolkit for anyone who needs to interact with SQL Server.

So Many Meetings I’ve said it. We’ve all said it. I can’t get any work done today, I’ve got so many meetings. I need to be reminded on occasion that for most of us, the meetings are work too. They are part of the job and we need to think of them as such. But I get it. I’m a technical professional. If you’re reading this blog, you probably are too.

T-SQL Tuesday is a monthly blog party hosted by a different community member each month, and this month Kevin Kline (blog | twitter) asks us to talk about an IT conference that resulted in a major opportunity. Tell us the story of how attending an IT conference or event resulted in an amazing career or life opportunity. It will be a common refrain in this community, but I’m going to pick a PASS Summit.

T-SQL Tuesday is a monthly blog party hosted by a different community member each month, and this month Deborah Melkin (blog | twitter) asks us for a database-related rant.

Who are we kidding? I like to rant. Here we go.

Note: I originally wrote this a few years ago but never posted it. It resurfaced when I migrated the blog so it’s being posted now.

After watching Kevin Kline’s (blog | twitter) webinar Essential Tasks to a Successful Cloud Migration, I downloaded the T-SQL scripts to run them against some of my databases. One of the included queries identifies tables with forwarded fetches and right on top of the list was a table with over 1.6 billion forwarded fetches in the roughly 3 weeks since the instance was last restarted.

T-SQL Tuesday is a monthly blog party hosted by a different community member each month, and this month Kenneth Fisher (blog | twitter) asks us to talk about our first technical job.

Is this thing on? If you’re reading this test post, it means DNS has updated properly and I’ve successfully migrated to Azure Static Web Sites. Welcome!

Over the next couple days (weeks?), a significant change is coming to my blog (and if you’re reading this text, it’s already happened). I will be leaving Wordpress behind and my current hosting. Replacing it will be an all-new site hosted on Azure Static Sites, with the content written in Markdown and pages generated via the Hugo static site generator.

If you’d asked me 5 years ago if I would ever speak at Summit, I’d have said “no way, not possible.” I didn’t even think I was able to produce the kind of material that’s expected at an event on such a large scale. Not to mention having that many eyes on me.

But times change. Experience, skills, and knowledge change. People change. And sometimes, people get talked into doing things things by their friends.

A collection of the resources mentioned in my PASS Data Community Summit session Backup Basics with PowerShell and dbatools, including bonus content!