Voice of the DBA

Category: Blog

  • Hardware Wrestling

    A few weeks back I had some issues. They were related to this:

    Computer at ankle level

    My standing desk was down and as you can see, the power button for my machine is on the front, just above ankle level. In a few years of working, this hasn’t been an issue. However, my daughter has a puppy this year, and while she’s in school, the dog is home. Normally my wife is outside with the dog, but when bad weather strikes, they are inside.

    The dog can be a bit trying at times, and in this case, she comes to sit near my chair, looking for attention. When she did that last month, she leaned on the power button and shut Windows down. Not so bad, but the third time this happened, as I was prepping for a webinar 30 minutes ahead, I had a little panic.

    That incident let to me deciding I need a new case. I didn’t have a great way to move the case, so I got some advice and purchased a Fractal Design R5 case on a recommendation from Glenn Berry (b1 | b2 | t). Maybe overkill, but it’s a nice looking case, and the power button is on top Winking smile

    I got it home and promptly traveled for a few weeks. No real time to do much, but I did eventually get ready to move all the pieces and parts. I put the old and new cases on the table and started moving things. My middle son helped, and eventually we had the parts transferred.

    IMG_2995

    And nothing happened. No boot up, no fans, nothing. We looked and found quite a bit of thermal paste on the CPU, some of which leaked on the side. A good lesson for me, don’t use much paste. However, we we cleaned things, we ended up bending some CPU pins.

    No worries, annoying, but I could afford a new motherboard, so I grabbed one. And then went out of town again.

    When I got back, I replaced the motherboard, but no booting still. I even took a picture and tried to be sure the CPU slot was OK. I had to, since I couldn’t see the pins.

    IMG_3098

    I even got another CPU and tried that, but it didn’t boot. At this point, I dragged things over to Glenn (he’s close by) and we decided the motherboard must be bad. I returned the CPU and got another new motherboard, which I installed last weekend, and everything worked. From the go, things booted.

    I added a new SSD in the process, and somehow had to remap some drives to different letters to get my Windows install working. I have some other minor issues, VMs that thought they’d been moved, Windows Search service acting up, and general funkiness with new hardware, but it seems things have settled.

    I’m not a big hardware guy, but it was interesting to take apart and put together a computer. I rarely do that, and while it’s a touch exciting, it’s also a pain. I prefer my hardware to just work.

    The puppy is cute, and she’s fun, but demanding at times. Here’s my view of the TV, trying to finish up Stranger Things one night.

    IMG_3131

  • Thankful

    It’s been a long career for me. In fact, I’ve been a SQL Server data professional for 17 years, just over half my life and almost the entire lifetime of the product.

    In that time, I’ve worked for a number of companies in different positions. Some were good jobs, some were less good. Some lasted quite a awhile, some were short term engagements.

    No matter how the experience ended, I find myself thankful for each position that continued to move me forward in my career. Even the tough experiences were ones that taught me something that was valuable later on.

    I’m also very thankful that I had the support of my wife, both emotionally and with her own career. That gave me the freedom to try new positions and even start my own business. I’m thankful that I haven’t had any major health issues, nor has my family. That certainly made it easy to focus on my career.

    I’ve had a great life and tremendous opportunities. On this day of thanks, it’s worth reflecting a bit on what has gone your way in life. I do think about this often, but I certainly am happy to take a few minutes and note that there is an abundance of things for me to be thankful for on most days.

  • Finding #dbatools #PowerShell commands

    I really like the dbatools project. This is a series of PowerShell cmdlets that are built by the community and incredibly useful for migrations between SQL Servers, but also for various administrative actions. I have a short series on these items.

    I was reading about Pester from Rob Sewell and saw he talked about a new command I hadn’t seen in dbatools: Find-DBACommand. This is a fantastic idea, and I think it’s my new favorite dbatools command, err, cmdlet.

    This is the search cmdlet for dbatools. With this, I can pass in a parameter of something I’m looking at and get results. For example, if I run this with “attach”, I get:

    2017-11-16 08_58_34-cmd - powershell (Admin)

    If I use “security” I get:

    2017-11-16 09_00_15-cmd - powershell (Admin)

    These are the ways that I’d most often use the command, but I can certainly do other things. There are tags on some cmdlets, so I can do this: Find-DbaCommand –Tag job

    2017-11-16 09_03_31-cmd - powershell (Admin)

    This gets me less results than just a search for the string “job”, and these are items focused on jobs themselves.

    I can loo for specific authors with the –Author parameter. I can also look for minimum or maximum versions of SQL Server, though I haven’t found anything that returns here in quick testing. In looking through some help and source code for other commands, I don’t see version tags, but hopefully that comes over time (Submit your PRs here).

    This is a fantastic addition, and certainly better than trying to search all of PoSh help for something like Backup. I might get way more commands I don’t care about there.

    If you haven’t tried dbatools, do it today. It’s a fantastic administration tool for your toolbelt.

  • One More Trip and Down for the Count

    The last month has been a rough one for me, with lots of travel. I was on trips for 4 out of the last 5 weeks, and the week I was home I had a remote presentation to do. Travel can be hard enough, but add in the need to continue to manage the day job as well as prepare and practice for presentations, and it’s a long stretch.

    Fortunately, I have a month off. Or nearly so. I have one last trip in December, and then I’m done for the foreseeable future. I have nothing scheduled in Q1 for travel, and I’d like to keep it that way. Apart from trip to visit the Redgate offices and a few customers, I’ll likely take quite a bit of 208 off from speaking at conferences. I’ve done a lot the last couple years and I need a break.

    Plus there are other projects with Redgate and SQLServerCentral I’d like to tackle, not the least of which is upgrading our infrastructure from SQL 2008/WS2003.

    I’ll still aim to get to a few new events next year, and I do appreciate the invitations. You’re always welcome to ask, but understand I’ll do less. I’d like to visit some new places, and Pittsburgh is tops on my list for now.

    It’s been a pleasure seeing and meeting so many of you the last few years. I hope you’ve enjoyed my talks, and I’ll certainly continue to do more in the future, just at a slower pace.