Voice of the DBA

Tag: Redgate

Two Weeks until SQL Saturday #222 in Sacramento

It’s just two weeks until my next trip. It feels like I just got back from London, and one again I’m prepping to leave again. This is my only trip in July, which I appreciate. It’s been a busy year so far, with lots of travel for me and I am glad to have a little downtime.

This trip is a mix of vacation and work. I’ll be heading out early as Red Gate has a mini-SQL in the City event on Friday. We’re trying to get customers to come, but if there is space next week, I’ll send out a registration link. I speak Saturday and then head back to San Francisco. My daughter is joining me on this trip, with the chance to tour the NoCal area for the first time. She was actually here with me when she was 1, but didn’t remember that trip.

I’m presenting my talk on searching binary data, which I’ve done a few times in the last year. This one will be a look at how you get information out of office documents from within SQL Server. It’s a neat feature for the product, and I’d like to hear how people are using it. Let me know if you are, or if I convince you to try it.

I’ve also got a joint presentation with Grant Fritchey on A Day in the Life of a DBA, showing the common problems you face and a few ways Red Gate can make your job easier.

I’m looking forward to a Sun/Mon/Tue vacation, getting some time off and recharging before I have a busy fall with the US SQL in the City tour.

July 12, 2013
SQL in the City 2013
Last week was the opening of a new SQL in the City season for Red Gate Software. Once again, for the third year in a row, we had our first event of the year in London. We had a new venue, and only one day this year, but it was sold out completely, with well over 400 people commuting to the middle of London on a Friday morning. I was lucky enough to attend, though my name being listed next to 4 of the talks probably ensure I had an admission ;). This was one of the busier events for me, slightly compounded by the fact that I arrived in London about 20 hours before the event and left the next morning.

It was quite a bit of fun see lots of familiar faces and meet a number of new ones. I had some interesting questions posed to me, and I think I was able to answer, or get someone else to answer all of them. Sometimes it’s more important to be able to do the latter, since SQL Server has grown in breadth and depth, as well as sheer numbers of versions to the point where no one can keep everything straight. We encourage networking at SQL in the City, as do many other events, and you should take advantage of the time to meet a few new people, and renew old acquaintances as well. You never know when you’ll need to ask someone a question, and a personal contact might get you an answer quicker.

The event ran smooth (Thanks, Annabel and Carly), as they all have over the last few years. This year we tried something a little different, focusing the morning on development topics and the afternoon on administration items. I liked that split, and I liked the flow in the morning between three sessions that built on each other to tell a continuous story moving from development, to testing, to deployment. Deployment is an important topic of conversation at Red Gate these days, and we hope that you find it to be important in your organization as well.

Our tour is a little shorter this year when it comes to the US, with three dates in the fall: Pasadena, Atlanta, and Charlotte. I know many of you were hoping we’d come to your city, and we might in the future. We are bringing smaller events, 40-50 person, half day seminars to a few SQL Saturdays later this year. If you’d like to have us come early to your location and speak at a SQL Saturday, let us know. It’s Grant and I doing most of the work, so we have a limited number of slots available, but feel free to voice your opinion to our Community group at Red Gate.

We like these events, and love the chance to speak with the community and customers, and plan on continuing them for the foreseeable future. I expect that we’ll bring more events to locations outside the US, and I look forward to meeting more of you all around the world at a SQL in the City near you.

Steve Jones

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June 28, 2013
The 2013 SQL in the City Tour

Once again, Red Gate is planning on a tour of the US for the SQL in the City events. Last year we had a large tour, hitting 6 cities in the US during October and November of 2012. It was great fun, and very well received by the attendees. I enjoyed it quite a bit, though it was a bit of a stressful time for me with all the travel.

This year we’ve scaled back slightly, but we’re still moving around the US. We have three dates scheduled, all packed into a week: Pasadena, Atlanta, and Charlotte.

Our first stop will be in California, on Wednesday, Oct 9, 2013. Red Gate has a sales office in the Pasadena area, and we’ll have a large staff coming out to meet customers and the SQL community. This event will be at the Pasadena Convention Center, in the North East LA area. It’s close to Arcadia Wilderness Park, where I’m hoping to get in a #sqlrun

Register today and join us if you are in the area.

Atlanta has a great SQL Server community. They consistently have the largest SQL Saturday events every year and there is a lot of excitement about the platform in this area. It would be a great place for a future Summit (hint, send your feedback to PASS).

We’ll be in Atlanta on Friday, October 11, 2013 at the Blackburn Conference Center. This is at the John Marshall Law School in the heart of the city. I’m expecting this event to sell out soon, so register today.

The PASS Summit is in Charlotte this year, and once again we’ll open the week with a SQL in the City event in Charlotte on Monday, October 14, 2013. If you’re in town early, or live there, register and come spend a fun day on Monday with us, talking about lots of development and DBA SQL Server topics

You can register now to join us at the Ritz-Carlton in downtown Charlotte.

That’s our 2013 tour (along with sold out London), and I’m looking forward to seeing many of you and meeting even more this fall.

May 27, 2013
Starting with Git for Database Development

One of the tools that Red Gate Software makes is SQL Source Control. It’s a plug in to SSMS that allows you to hook your database up to version control. I’ve used it a few times in the past in conjunction with Subversion to demo the product. However I hadn’t really used it for my own scripts since it’s primarily a single server system and not distributed. My own demos were on VMs with limited connectivity to the world.

A few weeks back, I was flipping through the https://www.simple-talk.com/Simple Talk newsletter, and saw an article on Continuous Integration for SQL Server using Red Gate Tools, Atlassian Bamboo, and Github. I’ve had many people over the last few years ask me about Git support for SQL Source Control and I was curious to see how well we supported things. I read the article and started downloading things.

The first thing I downloaded was GitHub for Windows. I installed it and wasn’t thrilled to see it not working. However what was unclear in the article and the installation was that this is just a GUI for your Git installation. Since I hadn’t installed Git, I needed to do that. Once I had done that, and set up a Github account, things worked fine.

I have numerous databases that I use for talks, but I usually create and destroy them with scripts during the talks. Not quite the way that SQL Source Control is designed to work. It works with objects, not scripts. However I wanted to test things, so I decided to build a database with the objects in it already. I wasn’t sure this would work for demos, but it would be a good test.

As you can see above, there are a few objects in my database.

My next step was to pick a place on my local drive where I could store my Git data. Since I do a lot from Management Studio, and use quite a few VMs, I wanted a standard location I could use easily and chose a folder under my SSMS installation.

Once this was setup, I created a new repository on my drive.

This was the place I’d keep all my code. With a free GitHub account, you can’t keep your code private, but that’s OK for this project since I give all my code away after talks.

Once I’d created this, Git put the folder on my drive.

Inside the folder was nothing, just a few Git files.

And in my Github interface, there was nothing to commit.

The next step was to link this with Git. After selecting my database in the Object Explorer, I switched over to the SQL Source Control tab to link my database to source control. I entered the path of my Git folder (from above) and selected Git as my VCS.

I chose a dedicated database, meaning this is just my database. The Shared database model can work, but I don’t like it for teams, or even solo.

Once this was done, I could see my database linked in SSMS.

I clicked the “Commit Changes” tab, and could see my three objects listed there as new items to commit.

If you have an existing database, this is the situation you’ll find yourself in most of the time. You link it, and commit all the changes. Once you enter a comment (please enter real comments you’ll understand), and press Commit, the objects are added to your folder. If I look at the folder, I see more stuff:

Only a few folders have objects, and those contain the .sql files for those objects.

If I look at Github, I see my comment and the changes are committed, but unsynced. If I press the “publish” button at the top, these are sent to Github.

That’s it. Any changes I make to objects, which I’ll show in another post, will commit to Git, and I can sync them to GitHub.

Come learn more about these topics on the SQL in the City 2013 tour.

May 8, 2013