We’re at least five weeks into this thing here in New York and while there are some encouraging signs, it’s more likely than not that “non-essential” workers aren’t at the halfway point yet. I’m preparing myself for a few more months, both mentally and in terms of my workspace. Here are a few resources that might help you as you settle into doing this long-term.

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Scott Hanselman’s Remote Work blog category. Scott has been a remote employee at Microsoft for over a decade, writing (and speaking) about it with some regularity.

A little while ago, Ray Kim (blog | twitter) asked a few folks who organize SQL Saturday events a few questions for his blog. The results are in and he’s compiled them all into one big post.

Check it out: What goes into organizing a #SQLSaturday? From the words of #SQLFamily

Settle in folks, this is a long, rambling post.

As this goes live, it’s been about three weeks since my abrupt switch from driving to the office every day to working from home full-time. This shift happened at the same time my kids had school cancelled, and our lives got flipped, turned upside down. So I’d like to take a minute, just sit right there, and I’ll tell you how I…am dealing with all this.

This tripped me up a few weeks ago, but once I stopped and thought about for a moment it made total sense. I was trying to copy some data into a temp table and got an error I’d never encountered before.

Column, parameter, or variable #1: Cannot find data type MyStringType.

What’s that all about? Let’s find out.

Why User-Defined Types?

I’ve never been a fan of user-defined types (UDT). They definitely have applications, but there’s also a temptation to use them to “standardize” things like string lengths or decimal field precision across a whole database. On the surface, that seems like a good idea. But these can cause trouble as well. Not right-sizing your fields can lead to data quality and query performance problems.

This is one of several posts on modernizing T-SQL code with new features and functionality available in SQL Server.

Last year, you finally retired the last of your SQL Server 2008R2 instances. Congratulations! But are you taking advantage of everything that your new instances have to offer? Unless you did a review of all of the T-SQL in your applications, I’m guessing not.

This one seems pretty basic, but it’s got a trick up its sleeve - the TRIM() function.

T-SQL Tuesday is a monthly blog party hosted by a different community blogger each month, and this month Tracy Boggiano (blog | twitter) asks us to talk about Query Store, whether we’re using it or not.

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For this T-SQL Tuesday, write about your experience adopting Query Store, maybe something unique you have seen, or a how your configure you databases, or any customization you done around it, or a story about how it saved the day.  Alternately, if you have not implemented yet blog about why if you are using 2016 and above, we know why if aren’t on 2016.  If you are unfortunate to be on below 2016 write about what in Query Store you are looking forward to the most once you are able to implement it.  Basically, anything related to Query Store is in for T-SQL Tuesday, hopefully everyone has read up on it and knows what it can do.

This is one of several posts on modernizing T-SQL code with new features and functionality available in SQL Server.

Last year, you finally retired the last of your SQL Server 2008R2 instances. Congratulations! But are you taking advantage of everything that your new instances have to offer? Unless you did a review of all of the T-SQL in your applications, I’m guessing not.

Let’s take a look at the SEQUENCE object, introduced with SQL Server 2012.

Last week (as I write this), Kevin Hill (blog | twitter) released the first episode of his new podcast Data Bits. I enjoyed listening to it and said “hey bud, if you need a guest sometime down the line, give me a shout!”

Well, “sometime down the line” turned out to be just a few days, and we recorded on the evening of March 4th amid a little craziness in both our houses. I always enjoy catching up with Kevin and our hour-long conversation could easily have been three or four. We talked tech, not tech, career stuff, and of course #SQLFamily.

Another SQL Saturday Rochester is in the books - our eighth over the past nine years. Unlike past years, I actually am going to recap the event! Ray Kim (blog | twitter) beat me to the punch with his own recap post, but that’s to be expected - he’s a much faster writer than I!

February? Really?

I got some interesting reactions when I started telling people we’d have SQL Saturday in February this year. Rochester isn’t exactly known for its hospitable winter weather (unless you’re into that kind of thing). We’ve historically held the event later in the spring - we’ve done it in March, April, May and even June. What kind of madman schedules an event that depends upon people traveling from afar in the middle of winter?

dbatools has a lot of functions. A lot. Over 550. There is a great command index on the website, and the documentation gets updated every time a new version is published. But sometimes, it feels like you can’t find what you need unless you already know the name of the thing you’re looking for. Other times, you might start writing your own wrapper around dbatools functions, or maybe start a new function from scratch, because it seems like the functionality you need isn’t there.