Voice of the DBA

Category: Blog

How Do You Use SQL Clone?

On Monday, Redgate released v1.0 of SQL Clone, and I’m excited that the product is finally available. I’m excited because this has been a long time coming, but it’s worth the wait.

You can certainly download SQL Clone and try it out, but I’d also say you should check out this virtual tour to see how the product works. It makes sense to me, but I’ve been testing it for months.

I’ve also written a few pieces about how SQL Clone plays with TDE (part 1 and part 2), and there’s plenty more at the SQL Clone site. Check it out today and see how you can easily build dev/test environments, at full size, without using all the disk space.

March 1, 2017
TSQLTuesday.com

I’ve hosted a page on this blog that has all the T-SQL Tuesday blog invitations and roundups linked. I did this mainly because I was trying to ensure I have hosted a few, I wanted to know what others had chosen. Since I didn’t see a good list, I created one.

And I’ve maintained it, which seems crazy since it’s been 6+ years.

Recently on a Twitter conversation someone suggested getting a central site, using a real domain. I thought that was a good idea, since my page isn’t necessarily the most intuitive item to find.

Somehow I ended up getting a domain transfer from Brent Ozar and getting talked into hosting the site. It’s live, now at:

TSQLTuesday.com

I did this with a simple Azure website, using WordPress. That’s another story, and I should blog about it, but for now, the site is live and running there. I’ve added Adam and Brent as administrators, so they can help maintain things.

I’m also open to suggestions on how to better organize things. I’d like to get a page for each entry, but we’ll have to see how that works.

February 28, 2017
Speaking at VS Live–Austin

I’ll be speaking at Visual Studio Live – Austin in May 2017. I was fortunate to be selected to speak again, after my first two VS Lives last year in DC and Orlando. I’m excited to go back, as the conference is a lot of fun, and Austin is a great town.

I have two sessions, Continuous Integration for Databases and A Tour of SQL Server 2016 Security Features. I’ve given similar sessions in the past, but I’m revamping the talks for this year, updating them and adding some new demos.

When I went to the conference(s) last year, I really enjoyed my time there. I had the chance to see some great SQL and Visual Studio sessions. With the upcoming release of VS 2017, and SQL Server v.Next, this is a good time to think about a spring conference.

Plus the margaritas and Tex-Mex in Austin is fantastic.

Hope to see you there if you want a learning opportunity this May. Register and use my code, AUSPK14 to save some money as well.

February 27, 2017
Upgrading SQL Server on Linux
I saw this week that there was a new CTP (v1.3) of SQL Server v.Next. I haven’t had a lot of time to work on the Linux version lately, but I thought I’d try and see how well the upgrade went.

There’s an install and upgrade page at Microsoft you can use, but on Ubuntu, things are easy. First, connect to your system and run this:
```
sudo apt-get update
```
That will download updated packages and get the system ready. you can see that I have a lot of stuff to update on this particular system.

Once this completes, you just run
```
sudo apt-get install mssql-server
```
This will actually perform the install. That takes a minute, and in my case, I walked away, letting this run. When it finished. I tried to connect from a local machine, but got an error. So I ran this:
```
systemctl status mssql-server
```
This should give me the status, which was that things had stopped.

OK, no problem. This starts the service.
```
systemctl start mssql-server
```
Once this completed, I could connect.

I’ve done this a few times over the last year, but not since CTP 1.0, so I reminded myself of the process.

So far, in my testing, most everything I’ve done with the core database engine, all scripts, etc., seem to work. More and more work is being done, and I’m interested to see how this version progresses.

If you like Linux, maybe you want to give this a try.
February 23, 2017