Voice of the DBA

Category: Blog

  • Unexpected Speaker Gifts

    I got two packages this week, both unexpected. They were nice surprises.

    First, a huge thanks to the Cloud Summit and Stephen Simon for running a great event and for allowing me to speak. This was quite an event, across many days with lots of sessions. I opened a package and found these items:

    20211123_134351

    A nice commemorative trophy for my desk, a shirt, a few stickers, and a neat spinner keychain. I also got a charging cord with a key ring that has UCB A, C, and micro B. Quite handy to keep these around, as I always find a time or place I’m missing one.

    A second package came from a corporate conference I was involved in. A beautiful overnight bag, an erasable notebook, and a keyring with a BT tracker.

    20211123_134130

    I’m honored and pleased when I get chosen to speak. I don’t expect gifts, but I’m always happy when someone goes to the effort to send something.

  • Daily Coping 24 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 make a meal using a recipe or ingredient you’ve not tried before.

    I like cooking, so this is easy for me. I will flip through recipes from a few mailing lists and look for something interesting. I ran across this list of 60 Easy Dinner ideas awhile ago, and I’ve been working through some of them. Not all, but some.

    I decided to do this one: Coconut Curry Ramen.  We like Ramen, and this was fairly simple. A quick cook in the pot and it was ready. I did do a few soft boiled eggs first.

    It was a fun, easy dinner, and one that the family enjoyed. I’ll add this to me permanent list of recipes to repeat.

  • Daily Coping 23 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 broaden your perspective: read something different.

    I tend to read a lot of fiction. If I flip through this year’s GoodReads, I see mostly books to help me escape. I tend to alternate between sci-fi, legal, mysteries, and thrillers. I sprinkle in a few coaching books and business books.

    One that I found different was Thanks for the Feedback. I’m in the middle of it now, and I didn’t really want to read it. A friend recommended it, as something that helped them grow. I don’t like reviews, but I decided this would be good for me.

    I found the book to be very interesting. It helped me to think about how I communicate with others, and how I might say something that is received differently. It also helps me think about how to react when someone gives me feedback.

    Quite a different read, but I’ve found it fascinating for me.

  • Reading Data from the Command Line in PowerShell–#SQLNewBlogger

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

    In every language I’ve coded in, there is a way to read input from the command line. From INPUT in BASIC, readln in PASCAL, scanf in C, read in LISP, input() in Python, and more, every language can do this.

    I knew PowerShell could, and I wanted to find out how to do it. I’m building a CLI tool for SQL Saturday, and I am looking to get user input.

    A quick search led me to Read-Host. I probably should have guessed this, but it does what I need. A quick example of where I started. This code gets an event number from a user and then prints if back out, along with a string created from the number:

    $EventNumber = Read-Host -Prompt "Event Number:"
    $DataFilename = "SQLSat$($EventNumber).yml"
    # write the data
    write-host("Event: $EventNumber")
    write-host("File: $DataFilename")

    I can run this, as shown here, and put in a number.  I typed in the first 1022 below:

    2021-11-17 17_45_25-● sqlsatcli.ps1 - sqlsatwebsite - Visual Studio Code

    I’ll use this to get information from the user and then produce a YAML file that will contain what’s needed to publish, or update, an event.

    SQLNewBlogger

    This post took me about 10 minutes to assemble. I was already working through this process and stopped to jot down an idea, save some code, and make a screenshot. That was about 2 minutes out of my day, and then I went on with coding. Later, I wrote this.

    You could do the same thing. Take a minute out of your daily work, sketch a quick post, and then finish it later.