Voice of the DBA

Category: Blog

  • SQL in the City 2017

    It’s almost time for SQL in the City 2017, coming Dec 13, live from Cambridge, UK. I’ll be traveling over to England for the event, and you can stream it to your office live. Once again, we’ll be presenting the conference twice, 11am and 6pm (both GMT), and you can pick the times that work best for you.

    We’ve got a variety of sessions scheduled, and you can tune in to ask questions live, which we’ll try to answer. The full schedule is on the site, but here’s a few sessions you may want to fit in:

    • Keynote  – Data Privacy and DevOps
    • Why code standards are important and how code analysis can help
    • From DBA to DevOps hero – rapid database provisioning with SQL Clone
    • What SQL Server performance metrics should you monitor?
    • Extend DevOps to the database by automating your deployments

    We’ve been working hard at Redgate to improve our tools and build new ones that will need the needs that many organizations will have as GDPR takes effect next year. And, as always, we’re trying to save developer time with all our tools.

    Take a training day to learn a bit about privacy, security, DevOps, code analysis and more. We’ll show how Redgate can help solve some of your issues along with  plenty of good general information.

    Hope to see you online, Dec 13.

  • Pluralsight for Another Year

    One of the ways that I try to keep current and learn is through Pluralsight. I’m lucky to get a subscription as a Data Platform MVP, but I’m sure Redgate would pay for one if I didn’t.

    My subscription ran out last week, but the support staff at Pluralsight was kind enough to renew me in minutes. Amazing service and greatly appreciated.

    If you haven’t tried online learning, I’d give it a go. Pluralsight has some great courses, but there are other choices as well. No matter what you choose, making some regular time to learn something fun, or improve those skills you use every day is a great way to keep your career moving forward.

  • Installing Pester

    One of the things that I believe strongly in is that we need better testing of software. Actually, what we really need is better habits and understanding of how to test our software. I don’t think we need to test everything, but we do need to know how to test some parts of our software, and we need to test those well.

    Enough on testing. Let’s talk Pester. I saw Rob Sewell (b | t) talk about Pester a few months back, and it’s been on my list to try something, but time and pressure have kept it on the list and not in the code editor. A week ago that changed when I saw Rob write Write Your First Pester Test. That spurred me to devote a few minutes after I read the piece.

    However, I ran into a snag. When I went to run Install-Module Pester, I got an error.

    2017-11-16 13_49_27-cmd - powershell (Admin)

    I tweeted a bit with Rob and Mike Fal (b | t), both of whom are some of my PoSh go-to people. They noted the Force option for install, which did work, but I not by itself.

    2017-11-16 13_51_31-cmd - powershell (Admin)

    As you can see there’s a security check. A good thing, but like many developers, I’m confident the Pester module on the Powershell Gallery at MS is OK. It’s got a different signature than the previous version. I could remove that, but I decided to add the –SkipPublisherCheck and move forward.

    This what I wanted to see.

    2017-11-16 13_51_41-cmd - powershell (Admin)

    Now I can move forward with Rob’s article and try some Pester tests.

  • Watch Out for Automap in SQL Compare

    I wrote a piece on SQL Compare and customizing the Automap feature. This was handy for me in a small project where I encountered drift and needed to fix the production side.

    In the article, I don’t map one of the columns in the target. In this case, I’d actually be dropping the target column in SQL Compare. After all, the idea of SQL Compare is that we want to synchronize the databases.

    If that’s not correct, then I’d need to do one of two things: add the column in development or add a filter. Filters are a great way to avoid issues in production when development items are in flight or uncertain (I’ve written about those as well).

    In this case, if I really needed to keep this column in production, I wouldn’t want to add a filter. Instead, I’d really want to add the column in development. In fact, I’d want to add it in the same place it is (column order) in production, so in Development I’d rebuild the table with the new column, in that order, and then run the Compare again.

    Automap can be a great feature, but it can’t know what your intentions are. It can only guess, like a new developer that is working on the system for the first time. SQL Compare needs guidance to do the job properly.

    SQL Compare is here to help you, and if you haven’t used it, give it a try. If you’re on a version older than 12, I’d say you should upgrade to 13 immediately. If you work with SQL 2017, then move from SQL Compare 12 to 13 and ensure all your comparisons work with the new features.