Daily Coping 1 Jan 2021

Posted on January 1, 2021 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 choose to give or receive the gift of kindness.

I’m giving this week. It’s in my nature, and I still struggle to receive.

My wife has been boarding horses for a friend that sold her house at the beginning of the pandemic and has struggled to find a new place. She finally did, but they had to rebuild some of the infrastructure from scratch.

As a part of this, she wanted some slow feeders for the horses. To reduce hay waste (a little) and ensure constant availability for horses (a lot), I build a number of feeders for my wife years ago.

IMG_20181014_113235

These are wood, nothing fancy, but they work well and we fill them each day with day that lasts 24+ hours (depending on # of feeders, weather,  and # of horses). This friend of my wife wanted two for her house. You can buy some commercial ones, but they tend not to work as well. My wife turned to me, asking if I would mind.

It’s work, and I have no shortage of things to fix, but I said yes, as a gift. I got wood before Christmas, and then spent a couple half days assembling these and getting them ready. Sometime in the next week, I’ll drive them up to the new barn.

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Daily Coping 31 Dec 2020

Posted on December 31, 2020 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 plan some new acts of kindness to do in 2021.

As I get older, I do try to spend more time volunteering and helping others more than myself. I’ve had success, my children are adults, and I find less “wants” for myself than I feel the impetus to help others more.

I also hope more people feel this, perhaps at a younger age than I am.

In any case, I have a couple things for 2021 that I’d like to do:

  1. Random acts – I saw this in a movie or show recently, but someone was buying a coffee or something small for a stranger once a week. I need to do that, especially if I get the chance to go out again.
  2. DataSaturdays – The demise of PASS means more support for people that might want to run an event, so I need to be prepared to help others again.
  3. Coaching – I have been coaching kids, but they’ve been privileged kids. I’d like to switch to kids that lack some of the support and privileges of the kids I usually deal with. I’m hoping things get moving with sports again and I get the chance to talk to the local Starlings program.
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Creating an HTML URL from a PowerShell String–#SQLNewBlogger

Posted on December 30, 2020 by way0utwest

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

I wrote about getting a quick archive of SQL Saturday data last week, and while doing that, I had some issues building the HTML needed in PowerShell. I decided to work through this a bit and determine what was wrong.

My original code looked like this:

$folder = "E:\Documents\git\SQLSatArchive\SQLSatArchive\SQLSatArchive\ClientApp\public\Assets\PDF"
$code = ""

$list = Get-ChildItem -Path $folder

ForEach ($File in $list) {

#write-host($File.name)

$code = $code + "<li><a href=$($File.Name)>$($File.BaseName)</a></li>"

}

write-host($code)

This gave me the code I needed, which I then edited in SSMS to get the proper formatting. However, I knew this needed to work.

I
had used single quotes and then added in the slashes, but that didn’t work. This code:

$folder = "E:\Documents\git\SQLSatArchive\SQLSatArchive\SQLSatArchive\ClientApp\public\Assets\PDF"
$code = ""

$list = Get-ChildItem -Path $folder

ForEach ($File in $list) {

#write-host($File.name)

$code = $code + '<li><a href="/Assets/PDF/$($File.Name)" >$($File.BaseName)</a></li>'

}

write-host($code)

produced this type of output:

<li><a href="/Assets/PDF/$($File.Name)" >$($File.BaseName)</a></li>

Not exactly top notch HTML.

I decided that I should look around. I found a post on converting some data to HTML, which wasn’t what I wanted, but it had a clue in there. The double quotes.

I needed to escape quotes here, as I wanted the double quotes around my string. I changed the line building the string to this:

$code = $code + "<li><a href=""/Assets/PDF/$($File.Name)"" >$($File.BaseName)</a></li>"

And I then had what I wanted:

<li><a href="/Assets/PDF/1019.pdf" >1019</a></li>

Strings in PoSh can be funny, so a little attention to escaping things and knowing about variables and double quotes is helpful.

SQLNewBlogger

This was about 15 minutes of messing with Google and PoSh to solve, but then only about 10 minutes to write up.

A good example that shows some research, initiative, and investigation in addition to solving a problem.

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Looking Back at 2020

Posted on December 30, 2020 by way0utwest

In some sense I hate to do this. 2020 was a black swan event for the world, with a pandemic that caused changes all across the world in ways that many of us might never have thought possible.

For the data platform, perhaps one of the more startling changes was the demise of PASS. This organization has been a part of my life for the last 20 years, and while I’ve had my disagreements, I think they have brought the SQL Server and related communities closer than they might otherwise have been. I hope that any of you that have had dealings with PASS or been to an event will wish the best for the staff at HQ. Anika, Audrey, Craig, Erick, Leeza, Marcella, and others have really helped the community over the years, and I hope I get to see them in the future.

We didn’t get a new version of SQL Server, though we got a number of cumulative updates. We also had quite a few updates to their tools, SSMS and ADS. The latest releases included a welcome change. You can now avoid installing ADS with SSMS if you run the installation from the command line. This was something requested and voted on by many people. Glad Microsoft is listening.

The other big thing that changed for many of us was the way we work. Our work environments dramatically changed, in a way that many managers would not have thought could be effective. Many organizations transitioned to remote work in March or April of 2020 and are still embracing the format. A few large tech companies will give people the option to work from home forever, though forever might be changed at some point. Some, like Microsoft, have picked dates next year, which I think is good. Choosing June or July makes sense, as it gives some stability for those with children.

At Redgate we went from requiring most people to be in the office to embracing a remote-first approach from this time onward. Lots of tech professionals have known this was possible, but haven’t had the chance until the pandemic forced this upon us. I’ve seen many people and groups thrive, which shows us that the office might not be quite as important as we thought. We also changed our attitude from coping with this change to thriving under this new paradigm. I don’t know what this will mean, and I certainly look forward to the chance to go back to Cambridge, but I’m not sure when that will be possible.

From the database perspective, much of 2020 felt somewhat like a blur. We had breaches, we had minor patches and changes. No big changes, no dramatic evolution of how we work with data, though I know all the cloud vendors would point to all the software releases they’ve during the year. I am hoping that 2021 starts to feel more normal, even if the pandemic continues to drag us along in the same manner. At least, I hope I adjust more.

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