Voice of the DBA

Author: way0utwest

  • A New Word: Fensiveness

    fensiveness – n. a knee-jerk territorial reaction  when a friend displays a casual interest in one of your obsessions.

    I think that some of us have some fensiveness about the things that we deeply care about if we worry about the friend taking a bigger interest or having more success when we do.

    I know I’ve felt fensiveness when I find a new game on mobile that I might enjoy and my wife sees it and is interested. Mostly because she’s a much better gamer and puts me to shame if we were really competing.

    We aren’t, but there have been times I’ve worked for a period of time to get to Level 100, and then my wife starts playing and is all of sudden 100 levels past me in a short time.

    From the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows

  • Casino Night is Back

    We are bringing back the SQL Server Central Opening Night party at the PASS Data Community Summit this year. This was one of the most fun things I’ve been a part of at the Summit for many years and I’m looking forward to the conference even more.

    The party will take place Tuesday night, after the Welcome reception. from 8pm-10pm, once again catered as a casino themed party. I’m using the same company we’ve used in the past, and we’ll have a cash bar and lots of prizes. I’ve already started to make a shopping list of fun things to give out as random prizes as you enjoy the games. In the spirit of competition, we will save a prize or two for the top chip winners.

    We will have a limit to the number of people that we can host, as this is a community event, and I do have a budget. Rather than using the referral codes as we did in the past, this year we’ll have a lottery. You’ll have to be registered for the PASS Data Community Summit, but if you are, and want to come, then you’ll need to fill out an entry form for the lottery.

    We’ll close the lottery on 21 Oct and then verify all the entrants are registered before randomly picking 150 of them. We are also working on a sponsor (for more prizes!!!!) and they’ll have a few tickets to give away as well. If you want a Golden Ticket, you’ll need to enter and cross your fingers. We only have limited space and may have a Scary DBA checking tickets at the door.

    If you’re on the fence about attending the Data Community Summit, maybe this will convince you to push on your management to send you. This is a huge data conference where you have the chance to learn, connect with others, and return to your job energized with lots of ideas, solutions, and inspiration for the future.

    Good luck to everyone and I look forward to seeing the lucky winners at the Casino Night party.

    Steve Jones

    Listen to the podcast at Libsyn, Spotify, or iTunes.

    Note, podcasts are only available for a limited time online.

  • Saving Emergency Space on my Laptop

    With my new laptop, one of the things I realized I’d forgotten to do in setup is reserve some space. I wrote about this years ago, but I wanted to ensure I always had space in the event of an emergency.

    Creating Placeholders

    In the previous post, I linked to the contig utility from Microsoft. I downloaded this and then copied the new 64-bit utility to my c:\utilities folder, which is where I keep a lot of generic stuff I run.

    Then I copied my old command and updated the exe call.

    However, I also built a quick batch file to give me 20GB of saved space. I called it create20gb.cmd and it contains this code:

    contig64 -n Hold1.place 1073741824
    contig64 -n Hold2.place 1073741824
    contig64 -n Hold3.place 1073741824
    contig64 -n Hold4.place 1073741824
    contig64 -n Hold5.place 1073741824
    contig64 -n Hold6.place 1073741824
    contig64 -n Hold7.place 1073741824
    contig64 -n Hold8.place 1073741824
    contig64 -n Hold9.place 1073741824
    contig64 -n Hold10.place 1073741824
    contig64 -n Hold11.place 1073741824
    contig64 -n Hold12.place 1073741824
    contig64 -n Hold13.place 1073741824
    contig64 -n Hold14.place 1073741824
    contig64 -n Hold15.place 1073741824
    contig64 -n Hold16.place 1073741824
    contig64 -n Hold17.place 1073741824
    contig64 -n Hold18.place 1073741824
    contig64 -n Hold19.place 1073741824
    contig64 -n Hold20.place 1073741824

    I made a c:\hold folder and dropped the cmd file in there. I then ran it. Here are the results:

    2024-08_0053

    Now if I find myself running low on space, I can go in here and delete a few files and get some space back.

    I recommend this for all machines, since I’ve run into the space problem so often, usually at a time when I’m stressed and I need space quickly. This makes it easy to get a bit of space back.

  • T-SQL Tuesday #178–A Recent Technical Problem

    tsqltuesdayThis month we have a good invitation from Deepthi Goguri, where she asks us about a technical problem. I think most of are technical people and we solve problems regularly. This is the same type of thing I ask people to blog on regularly, documenting their career.

    It’s a great way to prepare for future interviews as well.

    If you don’t blog, this is a good chance to start. Go to WordPress.com and get a free one. Then post on this topic.

    If you want to host, ping me.

    A Recent Technical Issue

    My blog is full of stuff I run into, or my customers run into. I try to post short pieces on the things I’ve been dealing with. Quite a few of my posts are on Redgate products, sometimes me digging into a technical problem and finding a way to accomplish the requirement.

    One of the more interesting ones recently was getting my Docker Desktop setup on a new machine. While installed the system was easy, I had to dig around and research a bit to try and understand how to use volumes. The documentation can be sparse, and it took some experimenting to decide that mapping specific folders in my compose file rather than trying to create permanent volumes was a better solution.

    I also had to experiment a bit with a few settings and paths to decide that I needed a specific place on my disk to hold all my data, which makes it easy to manage over time. I also had to make the decision on naming the containers. It’s easy to lose track of ports, and it’s sometimes hard to remember how to get the port, so to keep it simple, I used naming that has the port name in the container name.

    I wrote about the final process, which you can check out if you want to learn more.