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This is my second installment in a series responding to Steve Jones’s (blog|twitter) #SQLCareer challenge. I decided to jot down most of what I did through the day, filling a page and a half in a Field Notes notebook with timestamps and short reminders of what happened. For more, check out the #SQLCareer hashtag on Twitter.

Background

I’m one of two DBAs in my company, and my colleague is (still) on holiday on the opposite side of the planet so I’m juggling everything – on-call, regular operations, consults with developers, you name it. In production, we manage several thousand databases which sit behind about as many websites.

A few weeks ago, I teased good news.

just got some good news. can’t wait to share it

• Tweet by me at Fri Jul 20 16:42:28 +0000 2018

One person hypothesized that I’m joining Microsoft (it seems to be the thing to do lately) and another jumped to the conclusion that I must be pregnant. Both creative responses, but not quite correct.

I’ll be at PASS Summit 2018!

So much to do!

It’s official! I will be speaking at the inaugural PowerHour online lightning demo event on Tuesday, August 21st at 2200 UTC. I’ll be demoing Better, Safer SQL Queries from PowerShell.

If you’re working with SQL Server from PowerShell, either as a DBA, analyst, or anyone else running queries, you’ve probably used Invoke-SqlCmd. But depending on how you’re building your queries, this can be error-prone or a huge security exposure! With the help of the dbatools module, I’ll show you how to write and run these queries better and safer - and make them easier to work into your scripts to boot.

This is my first installment in (I hope) a series responding to Steve Jones’s (blog|twitter) #SQLCareer challenge. I decided to jot down most of what I did through the day, filling a page and a half in a Field Notes notebook with timestamps and short reminders of what happened. For more, check out the #SQLCareer hashtag on Twitter.

Background

I’m one of two DBAs in my company, and my colleague is on holiday on the opposite side of the planet (literally) for a couple weeks so I’m juggling everything - on-call, regular operations, consults with developers, you name it. In production, we manage several thousand databases which sit behind about as many websites.

Earlier this week, the PowerHour was announced. What is it? It’s kind of like a virtual user group. One hour, 6(ish) lightning demos (10 minutes or less), centered on PowerShell. All community-sourced and driven - anyone can submit a proposal for a demo and if accepted, you’ll be slotted into an available spot.

They’ve already set up a YouTube Channel so you can either watch live or catch up later on, and the whole deal is being organized and managed through GitHub. Got something you want to show off? Log an issue using the template!

This month’s T-SQL Tuesday is hosted by Bert Wagner and he asks us to write about code we’ve written that we would hate to live without.

First off, “hate” is a pretty strong word so let’s go with “code you couldn’t bear to live without”. The first bit of code I couldn’t live without is reviled in some circles. More often it’s misunderstood and lamented, or…well, I’ll just show it to you.

This week, I had the opportunity to be the moderator for Joseph Barth’s (blog|twitter) 24 Hours of PASS Summit Preview session about Azure Data Factory V2. It was fun, easy, and I encourage you to sign up to do the same!

Throughout the year, PASS hosts a number of online learning events. 24 Hours of PASS and virtual chapter webinars being the most common/visible. And in each session, the presenter needs a little help managing questions and watching the clock so they can focus on delivering their great content. It’s pretty easy. You just:

I really enjoy my job. I became a full-time production DBA about 14 months ago and it has been an overwhelmingly positive move. I work for a good company and with a terrific group of people. Many days, I have to force myself to leave the office because I was so engrossed in a task and just didn’t want to set it aside.

But there’s something that not everyone might consider before taking on this job. If you have a partner, children, or both, taking a job as a production DBA is really a family decision.

Triggers can be really useful in your database but you have to be careful with them. We often use them to record history to a separate table (at least, until we can implement temporal tables) or keep track of when a record was last updated. It’s usually implemented via an AFTER UPDATE trigger.

Several times a day, I’m alerted by our monitoring suite that two processes were deadlocked. This is a (mostly) normal event, but one that we’d like to avoid if we can. More than a few times, I observed this pattern:

This week I had a user come to me asking about how fields were defined on a few tables he was using in writing some reports. Long story short, he’s been tasked with writing some new reports and updating existing ones, but he doesn’t have visibility to the database itself so he’s left with the “ok, let’s try this” approach and then reading error messages to debug when things go sideways. Very tedious.