Voice of the DBA

Category: Blog

  • A Break During a Long Trip

    It’s a day off for me, so why am I blogging?

    I actually wrote this a couple weeks ago as I was prepping for this trip. I’m in Amsterdam today, taking a few days with my wife.

    I came over to the UK on 1 Sep and I won’t go home until 16 Sept. With a very long trip, I decided to break this up in the middle. My wife joined me on the 7th, and she will go back on the 14th. It’s a vacation for us both from work, and taking advantage of the work trip means that I don’t feel quite so worn out from a long trip.

    If I’d stuck around this week in Cambridge and worked, which was something I thought about, I’d be pretty tired when I went home. Plus, I would really be missing my wife. We are rarely apart for more than a week, and it’s hard when we are.

    Not everyone travels for work, and many of us have other family commitments. However, my wife and I are always looking for opportunities to travel, and when things line up with work, we try to take advantage of them.

    Hopefully your day is going as well as mine.

  • A New Word: Vulture Shock

    vulture shock – n. the nagging sense that no matter how many days you spend in a foreign country, you never quite manage to step foot in it – instead floating high above the culture like a diver over a reef, too dazzled by its exotic quirks to notice its problems and complexities and banalities, while drawing from the heavy tank of assumptions that you carry on your back wherever you go.

    I guess not technically a word, but two. However, as someone that has enjoyed and loves traveling, this hits home.

    My wife and I have made it a point to visit other countries, aiming to see a new one each year. In the last five years, despite the pandemic, we managed 11 countries outside the US, perhaps 5 new ones.

    As we travel, we’ve tried not to do too many tourist things. We do a few, but we’ve enjoyed renting an AirBnb in a neighborhood and living for a week like we might if we resided there. It’s been neat to walk around, to shop in groceries, to experience life in small, quiet sections of cities and towns.

    At the same time, I often feel foreign. I’ve grown up as an American for most of my life, and its culture is very ingrained in me. My habits, my languages, my preferences, my food, it’s very colored by my US upbringing. While I do try to experiment and try new things, everything I do is compared against my American-centric thoughts.

    An example. In Seattle recently, we went to a Filipino diner for breakfast, where I had Sinangag and Longganisa with eggs. I enjoyed it, and I need to make some, but it was strange not to have a more American breakfast, to not have something sweet, to not have a more salty sausage. I was in the culture, but not in it.

    I’ve felt the same thing in Greece, in France, in Portugal, in India, and other places. Even i the UK I feel somewhat immersed in and outside of the culture. Floating above it like a diver over a reef.

    From the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows

  • Future Data Driven is Coming Sept 27 for FREE

    The Future Data Driven 2023 virtual conference is coming on September 27. Register today and save a note in your calendar.

    I have been honored to speak at this event in the past. I’m not speaking this year as I’ve been buried with work and travel and need a break. However, I see a great schedule (scroll down) with some sessions that I will try to watch. A few on my mind:

    I can get information in other ways, but a conference is a good chance to hear what someone else has learned and shares with me. Even if I listen in the background, I’m learning some new things.

    There are lots of other great sessions, so register today.

  • Running Flyway from PowerShell–A Gotcha

    I ran across an interesting gotcha while trying to run a Flyway command from PowerShell. Specifically, the snapshot command and providing a parameter that is the snapshot.filename parameter.

    Someone reported an issue with Snapshot, so I tried it from a command line. It worked fine for me, but a sharp Redgate developer noted that the person was running something like this from PowerShell:

    flyway snapshot -snapshot.filename="deployed1.snapshot" -url="jdbc:sqlserver://localhost;databaseName=FWSimpleTalk_1_Dev;encrypt=true;integratedSecurity=true;trustServerCertificate=true"

    As you can see below, this caused an error.

    2023-08-28 11_52_27-Window

    I checked my version. Surely “flyway snapshot” was valid, and it was.

    However, there is an issue here with PowerShell and the parameter. In this case, the PoSh will try to interpret this as

    The issue is lightly explained in this SO question, though I can’t quite figure out where this is documented. However, using quotes around the parameter name fixes this. Note, I switched the parameter value to single quotes.

    flyway snapshot "-snapshot.filename='deployed1.snapshot'" -url="jdbc:sqlserver://localhost;databaseName=FWSimpleTalk_1_Dev;encrypt=true;integratedSecurity=true;trustServerCertificate=true"

    As you can see, this works.

    2023-08-28 08_25_29-Window

    PowerShell is closed to command shell, but not the same. Keep that in mind as you build automation. Be wary of how your parameter values might be interpreted and test lots of values.