This week is a double-whammy of activity - T-SQL Tuesday and PASS Summit 2020. T-SQL Tuesday is a monthly blog party hosted by a different community blogger each month, and this month Taiob Ali (blog | twitter) asks us how we’re coping with the COVID-19 pandemic, 8 months in. 2020 is a unique year for all of us. We are living through a worldwide crisis that most of us have not seen or experienced.

A former colleague emailed me with a question about retaining/fixing database users and permissions after restoring a database. They were copying a database from one instance to another, with different logins, users, and permissions between the two instances. Backup & restore to copy the database is easy enough, but because users & permissions are kept inside the database itself, the destination environment loses all its permissions settings in the process. What to do?

I’ve been meaning to write something this post for a while but the stars have aligned this week. Garry Bargsley (blog | twitter) published a post about making a schema-only copy of a database on the day that I needed to solve that exact problem. But that’s not what this is about. It’s just a convenient way to demonstrate this shortcut. I’m sure that a lot of folks do work on the PowerShell command line, trying various things, before committing to writing a full script or function.

Recently I set up a new process to pull data out of a MySQL database and into SQL Server. Pretty standard ETL stuff, but it’s the organization’s first time moving data in this direction, so we had some extra work to do. After installing the SSIS package and the MySQL .NET connector in the development environment, we went through a few rounds of “why isn’t this working? why isn’t that working?

A couple months ago I delivered a short (15 minute) presentation at work about the importance of having a good professional network and how I’d found mine. As I was developing it, I had to keep redirecting myself as the theme would start trending towards how great the #SQLFamily is. To be fair, that’s what inspired the topic in the first place, but 15 minutes of stories about my friends is not what my co-workers signed up for.

This weekend was SQL Saturday Albany 2020. This was my third time attending the Albany event, my second time presenting, and my first virtual SQL Saturday. As always, Ed & his team did a terrific job with organizing it. Communication for both attendees and speakers was excellent, and as far as I can tell, everything ran very smoothly. My Presentation I presented Keys to a Healthy Relationship with SQL Server in the 3:30 PM session block.

A little while back, I offered up a one-liner to scan your SQL Server instances and report which ones are out of date. But what if you need to take the next step, determining which updates need to be downloaded? That’s exactly what Josh asked on the SQL Community Slack recently. Can Test-DbaBuild also bring back the KB number? From reading the docs it looks possible as it does return the compliant version form the .

Just because we aren’t all together in Houston doesn’t mean we can’t have a #SQLRun at this year’s Summit. It might even be easier for some folks as there’s no luggage space/weight limits, jet lag or a late night out on Tuesday. So here’s the deal. A while back, I created a SQLFamily group on Strava. If you’re not already a member of the group, no problem - anyone can join!

Taking it back to SQL 101 today because I recently saw something that floored me. I’m a big fan of temp tables. I use ’em all over the place to stash intermediate results, break a dataset down into more manageable chunks, or even share them between procedures. And as it turns out, there’s more than one way to create them. The Traditional Way If you’re planning out your temp table usage, you’re probably creating them just like any other table, then populating them.

For the second consecutive year, I will be speaking at SQL Saturday Albany 2020 on July 25th, 2020. I will be presenting “Keys to a Healthy Relationship with SQL Server” at 3:30 PM. Abstract Developers and DBAs have had a long, sometimes strained relationship. Some developers see DBAs as roadblocks standing in the way of getting their work shipped; some DBAs see developers as agents of chaos bent on ruining their perfect database environments.