Voice of the DBA

Category: Blog

  • Graduation – An Exciting Day

    It’s quite an exciting day for me today. My oldest son graduated college this morning, finishing his Bachelor’s degree and beginning the next phase of his life.

    I’m quite proud of him and just wanted to put a few memories of him down related to data. He was the first kid in our household to seriously use a computer for school, and while his younger siblings are much more comfortable with computing than he is, we had some good times.

    • Setting up a networked computer and trying to limit access to various topics and sites on the Internet (a complete fail, BTW)
    • Reinstalling OSes for him after various viruses or other sites rendered computers unusable.
    • Discovering all my bandwidth was gone as my son found the wonders if BitTorrent.
    • Buying him a computer for Christmas, the first time I’d done that for someone.
    • Helping him learn some SQL as he studied GIS in college.

    It’s been an amazing time watching him grow, learn, and mature into an adult.

  • Advent of Code

    I ran across this site after reading a post from Jeremiah Peschka. It’s an interesting idea, and since I’m trying to improve my development skills in between the rest of my work, I thought this would be fun.

    Advent of Code is a site that has a neat idea. A series of puzzles, two a day, that are released each day leading up to Christmas. Since we’re within the 25 days, I’m late (and so are you), but you can join in anytime.  It’s also cool since it’s a fixed font, console looking site.

    2015-12-11 10_25_46-Jump List for SQL Server 2014 Management Studio

    The idea is that you get requirements for a puzzle, that you must code to solve. The inputs are too long to do by hand, though I suppose if you wanted, you could solve them in Excel. If you solve the first, you get the second.

    You can solve them however you’d like. I started doing some in Python, and also then re-solved them in Powershell. It’s mostly to just get some practice coding, and these are good excuses. I have been doing Python first, but I may switch to Powershell first, just to practice. If I get time, I’d like to redo them in C# as well.

    If you are looking to do some programming on the side, and practice something, this is a good way to focus on a particular problem and have fun. If you get stuck, there is even a subreddit with people posting questions and answers in a wide variety of languages.

  • Open Live Writer

    I’m writing this post from the Open Live Writer project software. I’ve used Live Writer for years, but it’s shown its age. Not the least of which is doens’t support OAuth2, so I haven’t been able to use it with my Blogger blogs.

    That should change, but we’ll see. Scott Hanselman noted there’s an open source fork of the software. I downloaded it today, and it’s slightly different, but not much. Mostly fonts from what I see.

    I may clone the project and see if I can fix things myself. There are some nagging items for me. However you should get the latest version and keep an eye on the project if you want a better blogging software tool.

  • Running Powershell with Task Scheduler

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

    One of the things I needed to do with my SQL Saturday download process was run this automatically. I don’t want to remember to do this, so I decided to set this up on a schedule.

    I ran a quick search and it seemed to be a simple process. Essentially I run the Task Scheduler application and then call my script as a parameter to the PowerShell exe. The first step is to run Task Scheduler.

    2015-11-05 11_43_36-Task Scheduler

    This has a list of jobs, which I found some to be interesting. I disabled Adobe and a few others. Those are really annoying. I clicked "Create a basic task".

    2015-11-05 11_43_47-Task Scheduler

    The basic task is a wizard to walkthrough. First enter a name and description. Use something that will help you in 5 months when this breaks.

    2015-11-05 11_44_07-Create Basic Task Wizard

    I decided to run this daily. It’s not a big deal to me, so I’ll let it just go.

    2015-11-05 11_44_16-Create Basic Task Wizard

    The time doesn’t matter, and I let it run in the middle of the day. This way I might notice it running sometimes and that will motivate me to keep working on this process.

    2015-11-05 11_44_22-Create Basic Task Wizard

    I want to run a program, so I choose that in the next step.

    2015-11-05 11_44_29-Create Basic Task Wizard

    The dialog wants to know which program. In my case, I’ll have to browse to my PoSh code.

    2015-11-05 11_44_36-Create Basic Task Wizard

    I pick my code and it puts the path in here. However that won’t run as is. If you’ve used PoSh, you know this doesn’t work.

    2015-11-05 11_44_44-Create Basic Task Wizard

    What I need to do is call powershell.exe. I found this in the reference item below and what I do is add "powershell" to the front of my file, and then use the "-file" parameter. I also enclose my PoSh script in quotes.

    2015-11-05 11_44_58-Create Basic Task Wizard

    When I click next, I get the warning, which I accept.

    2015-11-05 11_45_05-Task Scheduler

    There’s a summary after this, but I say OK to that, and then run the script from the Task Scheduler. It works perfectly, so I stop there.

    Now we’ll see how it works over time. And if I get the next step working.

    SQLNewBlogger

    This was a quick process for me. A google search, a 2 minute read, and then 2 minutes to build the task.

    It took maybe 10 minutes to write this post, most of which was taking the screen shots and resizing them.

    You can do this.

    References

    I just used one link, which was from the Scripting Guy blog.