Voice of the DBA

Author: way0utwest

Memories from SQL Saturday Orlando 2021

A few memories from this past weekend, during the first live SQL Saturday event in the US this year.

I’ve had plenty of plane flights this year, actually this was my 10th trip in 2021. However, most of those have been for personal reasons and with my wife. This was one of the few my myself, and the first where I was flying to an event by myself. I spent a few minutes reflecting on how often I’ve done this, how my first SQL Saturday was in Orlando, and how much I’ve missed this.

The morning of the event, I drove over from across the street. It was lightly raining, and while I knew roughly where things were, I’ve missed seeing these signs.

An older logo, but this still works. This brings back memories of setting up for the evnet in Denver, and being glad that we had signs arrows pointing both ways and trying to get sorted out to put the right sign in the right spot to point to the event. We messed that up a few times.

Registration was quiet. I am a little sad about that, but I understand a few things. Likely some people were busy with kids, thinking about Halloween the next day (or that night). Some were nervous or not ready for events, and some thought this was virtual. All fine with me.

Glad to see @sqlgene there.

The rooms were small, and a minor hiccup. The screen fabric was supposed to tape up, but the fabric walls didn’t work. Fortunately, the hotel had magnets. Who knew, the walls were steel.

I had never met Jean Joseph, but I was impressed with his efforts this year to help the community. He ran a Data Saturday, then did the Future Data Driven event. I was impressed with his work, effort, and enthusiasm.

A real pleasure to meet him in person.

There were a few vendors there, but it was good to see the interaction. Even with a smaller crowd, it seemed that plenty of people stopped by to chat with them. Shawn Myers here, from Tintri, talking with Patrick, one of the attendees.

It was great to see friends from the past. Jamey Johnston drove down and joined us to deliver a Power BI and Row Level Security talk.

I got to talk with him a bit as well. Jamey is a friend and one of the few people I’ve hung out with away from events. We have had a couple ski trips together and are hoping to get another one this season.

I had the chance to also catch up with Kendal Van Dyke, Microsoft employee, and a friend I’d see both in Florida and Colorado at times. It’s been too long and I was glad to see Kendal come and support the event.

Catching up with fellow speakers is always a pleasure. I don’t know when I last saw Kevin Feasel in person, but I do remember sitting in the top of a double decker bus in Cambridge with him, driving to an after event dinner a few years ago, and I miss the chances to sit and chat with him and others.

Aaron Cutshall is another speaker I’ve run into all over the country and I have no idea when the last time was, but it has definitely been too long.

I caught up with fellow SQL Saturday board member, Taiob Ali as well, and I loved his excitement about the event. Hopefully I’ll get the chance to come see him at an event in Boston sometime in 2022.

I missed taking a picture with Rob Volk, and I’m sorry. He is a dear friend that I’ve literally seen all over the world. The US, Europe, the UK, and Australia as well. We got the chance to have breakfast Sunday morning before I left, and as usual, it was another memorial few moments, too short, but very enjoyable.

I also updated the About page on SQL Saturday, as I realized Rob had crossed 100 events as a speaker. Contrats to him!!!! Please let him know as he’s volunteered his time and effort to teach and inspire people all over the world.

A quick trip, Friday afternoon to Sunday morning, and a nice view as I left Orlando. I enjoy taking pictures coming in and out of cities, and then seeing if I can recognize them years later when they pop up at memories.

Another great set of memories, and inspirational to think about going this more often in the future. A few people were excited about the future and looking forward to helping more events come about in 2022.

November 2, 2021
Daily Coping 2 Nov 2021

I started to add a daily coping tip to the SQLServerCentral newsletter and to the Community Circle, which is helping me deal with the issues in the world. I’m adding my responses for each day here. All my coping tips are under this tag.

Today’s tip is to identify three things that give you hope for the future.

I have a lot of hope for the future. Here are three recent things that make me believe the world will be better in 2022 than 2021.

First, going to a live conference was great for me. I had another one last week, SQL Saturday Orlando 2021, and I have two more on my future schedule. While the movement for many free events seems slow and tentative, I am hopeful that we’ll start to see more SQL Saturdays or Data Saturdays in 2022.

Second, kids sports seem to be working well, and that’s an important hobby for me. I’m hopeful after coaching during the pandemic last year that my efforts will look more normal this year.

Third, I’m both surprised and pleased by the number of people around the world and in various countries getting vaccinated. I’m also pleased that many private organizations are starting to require proof of vaccination or a negative test. Those types of efforts will go a long way towards moving us to normality and a better future.

November 2, 2021
A Version Control Primer for Databases

This is a talk for database people that might not be familiar with version control and how it can be used with database code.

Abstract:

With modern DevOps software development, there is a need for the database code to be tightly integrated with application code, and this requires the use of a version control system (VCS).

This session will examine the basics of version control, the different types of systems, and how we can use them for database code. There is an emphasis on Git, as this is the most popular VCS in use today.

Level: 100

Slides: vcs_primer.zip

November 1, 2021
Quick CSV Import with dbaTools – #SQLNewBlogger
Another post for me that is simple and hopefully serves as an example for people trying to get blogging as #SQLNewBloggers.

Recently I was searching around for some sample data for a project. I stumbled on a CSV of data from the Internet Movie Database (IMDB). I wanted to quickly import this into a database to play with and query. I decided to use dbaTools since my csv python skills were a little rusty and I thought this would be quick.

This post looks at how easy this was.

Disconnected from the Internet

I had downloaded the CSV before getting on a plane, but once I was ready to import this, I had no access to the Internet. This meant I had no access to looking up commands or documentation. As a result, I decided PowerShell and dbatools would be the easiest way to do this.

I ran a quick Get-Help command and got the name of the command. Using wildcards, I could see the dbatools result below.

I then ran “Get-Help Import-DbaCsv” to get the syntax. Using the results below, I wanted to see how quickly this would run.

A Quick Experiment

With the docs above, I created a database and then entered this command.
```
$movie = Import-DbaCsv -SqlInstance localhost -Database IMDB -AutoCreateTable -Path "IMDB-Movie-Data.csv"
```
This was my experiment. Just try some values and see what happens here. This ran in less than a second, and from ADS, I could see the data had been imported.

When I checked my variable, I saw that things had just worked with the 1000 rows imported in less than half a second.

Success!

This wasn’t my main task, but using some tools and some past knowledge, I figured out how to accomplish this task quickly and get back to the process of writing SQL code to query the data.

SQLNewBlogger

My entire purpose here was to write some queries against this data, but I needed to import the data. Either ADS or SSMS have import wizards, but I’ve had various levels of success at times with them. I didn’t want to work through an ETL process. Once I saw how quick dbatools made this, I decided to write this post, based on the ease of getting something done.

You could easily duplicate this post, noting why you needed to do an import and how easy this was. You could compare this to SSMS or ADS, or even write about starting to use dbatools for this purpose.

This took me less than 10 minutes.
November 1, 2021