An Amazing Live SQL Bits in 2022

Posted on March 15, 2022 by way0utwest

I was lucky to travel to London last week and attend SQL Bits 2022. This was the first live SQL Bits I’ve been to in 4 or 5 years, and the first one held since 2019. Two years away, but back strong and as wonderful as ever.

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The event was at the London ExCel center, which is a large exhibition hall. There were 4 or 5 other events taking place, and the 1,000+ SQL Bits event was in less than 1/10th of the space. Still, a large space that reminded me of what a large conference is like.

The event hall was a large space, surrounded by curtains, with booths in the middle and around the edge. The Community Zone was a section near registration that had some benches, large pillows, and of course, an arcade machine. Various people were hanging out here all week.

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The “rooms” were spaces that were curtained off with large screens, stages, and seating that was separated out with tables and space. Overall, I liked the room, though there was a low rumbling of crosstalk from other sessions. Not so loud that it felt like I was listening to two speakers, but more there was a lot of ambient noise, and I had to focus on my speaker. Applause was a bit loud.

I saw lots of friends. Here’s my Kevin Kline shot, adding to my collection. I’ve seen Kevin at events all over the world for the last 20 years and it’s always a treat.

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I also ran into John Morehouse and many others. I didn’t end up taking as many pictures as I would have liked. A sore wrist and a phone stuck in the wrong pocket had me rarely taking it out.

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The Friday keynote was a Community one, which I really liked. Rob Sewell and Ben Weissman hosted and asked a number of us to pick our favorite feature in the data platform.

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I had my moment on stage and someone got a nice shot.

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Both keynotes were live in one of the 12 rooms, but broadcast to the others. That meant that there wasn’t a large space where everyone had to go to in order to watch. They could go to session rooms and see the keynote. I like this idea, and would like to see it at more events. Requiring a large space is hard, and expensive.

One thing I like about Bits is lots of breaks, with time between sessions to walk around, see people, get coffee, etc. Some events seem to have everyone running from place to place, but Bits is more relaxed.

Speaking of relaxing, I was wiped out by Friday afternoon. I spent a good portion of time relaxing in the main expo hall, talking with Redgaters and others.

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London is an amazing city, one of my favorites, and I had a couple nice dinners out with Brent Ozar. Here’s one with Erik Darling and his wife. Wonderful times with friends that I’ve missed the last two years.

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The party Friday night was a fun affair. I liked that some food and refreshments were in the expo hall, which was quieter. A smaller space behind there was the louder party with music, games, and dancing. Not quite my style, but it was nice to see people having fun. I had to fly Saturday morning, so a quick photo with Grant and Kathi as I was leaving.

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SQL Bits went too quick, and I was sorry that I wasn’t there for the last day. It was a lot of fun, and a sign that people still want to meet in person and conferences will come back. I’m looking forward to future events and hopefully SQL Bits in 2023 as well.

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Daily Coping 15 Mar 2022

Posted on March 15, 2022 by way0utwest

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 eat mindfully. Appreciate the texture, taste, and smell of your food.

I don’t do this too often, especially lately. I have a plainer diet, though I am slowing down how I eat and appreciating the few things I do eat.

However, I was invited to an amazing dinner by Brent Ozar in London and I went out of my way to try and appreciate the food. I’m not a foodie, but I did enjoy the time at one of Gordon Ramey’s restaurants where the chefs are trying to show off.

This was an oyster. Looks like an oyster, but it was jellied, like a gummi bear or other jell candy. Softer, and quite amazing. I don’t love oysters, but this was something special, with the jellied taste instead of a slimy one.

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Roast duck was amazing. The presentation was something, as we saw the whole duck. But then this slice smelled wonderful, and it was tender and full of the duck flavor, with a blend of spices accenting things. The side was turnips, with a turnip puree as a paste. Not a fan, usually, but this was an enjoyable bite.

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The fish was great. Cod, but with caviar on it, and potatoes under. The popping of the caviar, slightly salty, with a very tender, flaky fish. Amazing.

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There was more, and all of it made for a wonderfully memorable evening.

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The Challenges of Changing Software Tools

Posted on March 14, 2022 by way0utwest

Years ago I set up an email account for my son using Gmail, periodically forwarding things I thought he might find interesting. One day I was with him at his PC and asked if he’d seen something from me. He said he hadn’t and opened his mail. He had dozens of emails, many of them marketing. I asked him why he didn’t delete some of the obvious marketing ones that he didn’t care about. He pointed to the sidebar, where the usage of his account was listed. It showed a few percent of the 10GB he was assigned in use. He said if the usage got too high, he would. For now, he would rely on search to find things.

That was fascinating to me. I’d grown up with limited space, used folders for organization, and pruned out anything old or useless. It was an eye-opening conversation to me on the difference in how generations looked at computing. That same thing is happening on a larger scale. As this piece shows, newer generations are approaching the way they use computers in a completely new way. They don’t even necessarily know how to find items on their computer by browsing, which is strange for older users. It’s a trend that vendors embrace. In Windows, Microsoft surfaces “Documents”, “Pictures”, “Music”, etc., and I find many people have no idea where those folders actually are in the file system.

I used to worry that we were losing skills that were needed. However, now I’m not so sure. The scale of items we might save has grown. In many ways, why would we care where they are on a system. Really, we need a way to access them, and linkages, search, and other techniques might be better than relying on our memories of how we’ve filed things. As I think about it, many of the problems of deploying software over the years have been because of incorrect paths. Why should developers manage that? Why don’t projects and compilers just sort this out for us? How many times have I had to add an entry to my PATH variable? Shouldn’t executable software solve that for me?

Certainly someone needs to care about locations and security and various other details, but for most people using a system, these are unnecessary details. I don’t know “where” stored procedures or functions reside. SQL Server ensures they exist somewhere and the various Object Explorers in tools put them in a place I can find.

I embrace these types of changes and encourage our industry to make installing and using software, as well as the management of files and other items easier and more autonomous.

Steve Jones

Listen to the podcast at Libsyn, Stitcher, Spotify, or iTunes.

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Changing the Owner of a Database #SQLNewBlogger

Posted on March 14, 2022 by way0utwest

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

I had an authorization issue with my account, and I decided to delete it and re-add it. That’s the subject for another day, but before I could delete it, I had to remove the ownership of some databases. You can’t delete a login that owns databases.

I realized I wasn’t sure how to do this, so I wrote this post.

A Deprecated Proc

There used to be a dbo.sp_changedbowner proc that was used, but I know this is deprecated and it shouldn’t be used. It likely would work fine in SQL Server 2019, but I also know there should be more modern code. I decided to look, as I ought to know what is recommended these days.

In searching around MS Docs, ALTER AUTHORIZATION comes up in the list. I checked, and this allows me to transfer the ownership of a securable, which a database is one of the items in the list. Example F shows what I want to do and uses this code:

ALTER AUTHORIZATION ON DATABASE::dbname TO [login]

I can replace dbname and login with the values I need.

Which Databases?

I have a lot of databases, and I don’t need to change them all, though I could. In my case, I decided to get a list of databases and owners. If you query sys.databases, there is an owner_sid column. If you join that with sys.server_principals, you can do so on the SID column. This query shows me what I need:

SELECT d.[name], sp.[name] FROM sys.databases d
  INNER JOIN sys.server_principals AS sp
   ON d.owner_sid = sp.sid

The results are here:

2022-02-25 12_34_10-SQLQuery1.sql - ARISTOTLE_SQL2017.master (sa (54))_ - Microsoft SQL Server Manag

In some sense I hate that “sa” isn’t the default owner, but I get it. There might be a need for other accounts. However, my account is a sysadmin, so my view here is that “sa” ought to be listed.

I digress. Now that I have a list, I can limit it to my account with a WHERE clause. I can take that list of items and build the code. I could use a cursor, but this is a one-off task, so this works:

SELECT
                'ALTER AUTHORIZATION ON database::' + d.[name] + ' TO sa;'
              , d.[name]
              , sp.[name]

FROM
                sys.databases d
     INNER JOIN sys.server_principals AS sp
         ON d.owner_sid = sp.sid

WHERE          sp.name = 'ARISTOTLE\Steve';

GO

This gives me the code in the results I want to run. I copy paste this and I have a bunch of statements to run. 

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Despite Grammarly not being happy, this worked fine.

SQL New Blogger

As soon as I realized I needed to do this, I knew there were two posts here. One on the removal and adding back of my Windows account, and the second on this topic (when the first didn’t work).

This took about 15 minutes extra, finding the docs and writing some code, but it’s a good example of where a small situation that occurred helped me find something to write about. Easy for you to take little tasks like this and document your knowledge when you learn something.

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