Voice of the DBA

Category: Blog

  • Daily Coping 21 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 connect with someone near you – share a smile or chat.

    One of the things I’ve still been able to do this month is go to yoga at the gym. I try to go a couple times a week, and then practice at home some times.

    Recently, I went early and saw someone I lightly knew from class. Rather than just sit and start my own warmup, I said hi, asked how they were doing and spent a couple minutes engaging pleasantly with someone else.

    That’s one of the things that doesn’t happen often during the pandemic, and it is something I appreciate taking the time to do.

  • Daily Coping 20 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 switch off your tech 2 hours before bedtime.

    I try to get away from my computer after work. I am lucky in that I have a separate office and PC. I typically don’t use a computer after hours, and I try not to use my phone too much at night. I do read on it, which I don’t count as “tech”, and have gotten better at not switching to check other things.

    I decided recently to skip reading and instead, just put my phone on the charger and ignore it. My wife and I do watch some TV at night, but I took time to instead hang out, play some cards, play some guitar, and relax without any digital anything.

    It was a nice break. Something I should do more often.

  • Daily Coping 19 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 get moving. Do something physically active (ideally outdoors).

    I am going to get active today. I’m taking a couple days off with my wife and heading to the mountains to ski. I went for the first time last week with a friend, and this will be my first time with my wife. We’re driving up early and will spend a couple days enjoying the outdoors, getting some exercise, and taking a break from life.

    I hope you find a way to do something similar soon.

  • Renaming Files by Padding Numbers with PowerShell

    Some time ago I had downloaded all the SQL Saturday XML files. I’ve been meaning to flatten those into a database, but that project keeps getting away from me. And now it’s become an archive task.

    In any case, I’ve been looking to work with Jekyll and get a list of events. There is one at SQLSatHistory.com, but I’m going to try and do a bit more than a simple list. In any case, I have found a small issue: my files were named SQLSat1,xml, SQLSat2.xml, etc.

    That’s not a big problem, but it results in my archive looking like:

    • SQL Saturday #1 – Orlando
    • SQL Saturday #100 – Brazil
    • SQL Saturday #101 – Kansas City
    • etc.

    The file names are strings, and in alpha sorting, 100 comes before 2. That’s not critical, but it’s not what I want, and I would like something that’s a bit better and easier to follow.

    The easiest way to do this is to rename the files. I have some data in the files, and I have those being parsed, so if I can rename the files, I can get the events generated in an orderly fashion.

    PowerShell has a Rename-Item cmdlet, which will work, but what new name? I need to parse out the filename and then come up with a new one. Likely there are better methods, but this worked quickly for me to rename some files.

    The Process

    My thought in doing this was first to extract out the number and then check the length. From there, I can assemble a new string. Instead, as I was starting, I thought of a better way. I decided to remove everything but the number.

    There is a replace method for strings. As In, I can do this:

    $EventNumber = $XmlFile.Name -replace 'SQLSat', ''

    This will take away the string before the number, and results in file names going from:

    • SQLSat1.xml
    • SQLSat2.xml
    • SQLSat3.xml

    to

    • 1.xml
    • 2.xml
    • 3.xml

    I repeated that and removed the .xml as well, which gave me each event’s number. From here, I found a cool trick on Stack Overflow to do this. The PadLeft method is used

     % PadLeft 4 '0'

    I use 4 as a padding factor. This results in giving me what I want, and when I concatenate this, I get the file names I want.

    $NewFile = "SQLSat" + $EventNumber + ".xml"

    From there, a simple call to Rename-Item with each file resulted in an orderly list of events.

    2021-01-07 13_21_43-xml