Voice of the DBA

Author: way0utwest

  • Building a Better Community

    The demise of the PASS organization is just a few weeks away, and if you want to watch or save any content, be sure you get moving. The sites go dark on 15 Jan 2021, so time is short. I found I could right click and save a number of the PASS Pro videos, as I’d like to see what content was produced by some of my friends and fellow community members.

    As we look forward, I am hopeful and excited that the community will continue to come together and find ways to grow and share with each other. Already DataSaturdays are up and events coming. Even if my bid for SQLSaturday.com falls short, I’m not remotely worried. We will continue to grow and run events that help the SQLFamily share, grow, and bond. The excitement and growth of the community across the last two decades was facilitated by PASS, but I think it’s really the people in the community that have done the work of building an amazing movement, especially around SQL Saturday.

    I saw this past week a number of posts that look to the future. I liked Brent’s question of what you might want in a community. Most of the respondents note that content is the number one goal, which I agree with. When Andy, Brian, and I started SQL Saturday, we did so with the idea that many people don’t have the time or resources to go to the Summit (or SQL Bits, SQL Intersection, etc.). We wanted to provide a way that most people could get the conference experience and get inspired and excited. It worked better than we ever imagined, and I’m confident that many people will find ways to do so in the future. Already, with events like GroupBy, New Stars of Data, Data Relay and DataGrillen, there is plenty of enthusiasm in the community.

    We are having discussions about how to replicate some of the success with Data Saturdays already. There is guidance for speakers and user groups. If you are a part of any of those, ensure that you are preparing for things to change in a few weeks. Look to the future, and find a way to help your community grow in 2021.

    Steve Jones

  • Daily Coping 1 Jan 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 choose to give or receive the gift of kindness.

    I’m giving this week. It’s in my nature, and I still struggle to receive.

    My wife has been boarding horses for a friend that sold her house at the beginning of the pandemic and has struggled to find a new place. She finally did, but they had to rebuild some of the infrastructure from scratch.

    As a part of this, she wanted some slow feeders for the horses. To reduce hay waste (a little) and ensure constant availability for horses (a lot), I build a number of feeders for my wife years ago.

    IMG_20181014_113235

    These are wood, nothing fancy, but they work well and we fill them each day with day that lasts 24+ hours (depending on # of feeders, weather,  and # of horses). This friend of my wife wanted two for her house. You can buy some commercial ones, but they tend not to work as well. My wife turned to me, asking if I would mind.

    It’s work, and I have no shortage of things to fix, but I said yes, as a gift. I got wood before Christmas, and then spent a couple half days assembling these and getting them ready. Sometime in the next week, I’ll drive them up to the new barn.

  • Daily Coping 31 Dec 2020

    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 plan some new acts of kindness to do in 2021.

    As I get older, I do try to spend more time volunteering and helping others more than myself. I’ve had success, my children are adults, and I find less “wants” for myself than I feel the impetus to help others more.

    I also hope more people feel this, perhaps at a younger age than I am.

    In any case, I have a couple things for 2021 that I’d like to do:

    1. Random acts – I saw this in a movie or show recently, but someone was buying a coffee or something small for a stranger once a week. I need to do that, especially if I get the chance to go out again.
    2. DataSaturdays – The demise of PASS means more support for people that might want to run an event, so I need to be prepared to help others again.
    3. Coaching – I have been coaching kids, but they’ve been privileged kids. I’d like to switch to kids that lack some of the support and privileges of the kids I usually deal with. I’m hoping things get moving with sports again and I get the chance to talk to the local Starlings program.

  • Creating an HTML URL from a PowerShell String–#SQLNewBlogger

    Another post for me that is simple and hopefully serves as an example for people trying to get blogging as #SQLNewBloggers.

    I wrote about getting a quick archive of SQL Saturday data last week, and while doing that, I had some issues building the HTML needed in PowerShell. I decided to work through this a bit and determine what was wrong.

    My original code looked like this:

    $folder = "E:\Documents\git\SQLSatArchive\SQLSatArchive\SQLSatArchive\ClientApp\public\Assets\PDF"
    $code = ""

$list = Get-ChildItem -Path $folder

ForEach ($File in $list) {

#write-host($File.name)

$code = $code + "<li><a href=$($File.Name)>$($File.BaseName)</a></li>"

}

write-host($code)

    This gave me the code I needed, which I then edited in SSMS to get the proper formatting. However, I knew this needed to work.

    I
    had used single quotes and then added in the slashes, but that didn’t work. This code:

    $folder = "E:\Documents\git\SQLSatArchive\SQLSatArchive\SQLSatArchive\ClientApp\public\Assets\PDF"
    $code = ""

$list = Get-ChildItem -Path $folder

ForEach ($File in $list) {

#write-host($File.name)

$code = $code + '<li><a href="/Assets/PDF/$($File.Name)" >$($File.BaseName)</a></li>'

}

write-host($code)

    produced this type of output:

    <li><a href="/Assets/PDF/$($File.Name)" >$($File.BaseName)</a></li>

    Not exactly top notch HTML.

    I decided that I should look around. I found a post on converting some data to HTML, which wasn’t what I wanted, but it had a clue in there. The double quotes.

    I needed to escape quotes here, as I wanted the double quotes around my string. I changed the line building the string to this:

    $code = $code + "<li><a href=""/Assets/PDF/$($File.Name)"" >$($File.BaseName)</a></li>"

    And I then had what I wanted:

    <li><a href="/Assets/PDF/1019.pdf" >1019</a></li>

    Strings in PoSh can be funny, so a little attention to escaping things and knowing about variables and double quotes is helpful.

    SQLNewBlogger

    This was about 15 minutes of messing with Google and PoSh to solve, but then only about 10 minutes to write up.

    A good example that shows some research, initiative, and investigation in addition to solving a problem.