Voice of the DBA

Tag: Redgate

Installing the #SQLPrompt Public Preview in ADS

The SQL Prompt Public preview extension for Azure Data Studio is out and you can add this easily. This is a quick post showing a few ways to install an extension to the tool.

First, download the preview from here. Unzip the file and you should have a file named sql-prompt-0.2.0.vsix on your filesystem.

Now, from Azure Data Studio, you have a few choices. The File menu includes an Install Extension from VSIX option.

If you have the Extensions pane open, there are three dots in the upper right. Click them and there is an “Install from VSIX” option.

For now the SQL Prompt extension is not in the marketplace, but it is coming. Many third party marketplace extensions will also have you download a VSIX file, so this method works for those as well.

Click the menu item from either source and a file browser will open. Find your SQL Prompt VSIX file and click it. You will get a third party warning in the lower right side of ADS. Click Yes to install.

This will install quickly and you will get a notice it is installed in the lower right.

Then you can begin using the extension. CTRL+Shift+P brings up some command palette, and if you type SQL Prompt, you’ll see some of the options.

I’ll explore some of these items in future posts.

I’ve added a short video of this post on the Redgate YouTube channel: https://youtu.be/jplENuTg7Qo

Installing SQL Prompt into ADS

May 13, 2020
The Bite-Sized Redgate Summit comes back this week
This week we have another edition of the Redgate Summit taking place on May 13, 14, and 15. We have different times each day to cover the world. The dates and times are:

Europe, the Middle East, and Africa – May 13 3:00pm to 4:00pm BST Register

Americas – May 14 3:00pm to 4:00pm CDT Register

Asia-Pacific – May 15 11:00am to 12:00pm AEST Register

The content is the same each day, with two topics being covered:
- Using Local and Hosted Agents for Build with Azure DevOps
- Working From Home Necessitates Communication Changes
Each of these sessions is 20 minutes, with about 10 minutes for questions. Since the Advocates are spread out, and the sessions are short, each of us is handling a different day and time.

Wednesday (Europe) – Kendra Little

Thursday (Americas) – Grant Fritchey

Friday (ANZ) – Steve Jones (me)

I’ll actually be doing the broadcast Thursday evening my time, which works out to Friday morning in Australia. Hopefully this also means I get to go back and give live talks in Australia and New Zealand at some point.

Register today and join us later this week.
May 11, 2020
A Day in the Life of an Advocate

I have one of the best jobs in the world. I get to work from home, travel to lots of events, set much of my own schedule, and I work for an amazing, supportive company. I’m incredibly proud of the way Redgate Software has handled this pandemic crisis. From strong leadership, a commitment to employees, the Community Circle, and the very strong work by our Core services team to ensure technology has helped us continue to operate as a business.

We maintain an internal company blog where lots of information is shared by individuals and groups. Each week we compile a list of important posts that are sent to all employees on Friday. It’s a way to understand different things that are happening inside the company, since many of us are focused on our own jobs and might not know what others are doing. Recently, I was asked to write a post for the blog on a day in the life of an Advocate. I was happy to tackle it, but included Kathi, Kendra, and Grant as well, since we all share that title, but have very different jobs.

What do we do? For the most part, we do what the title says: we advocate. We advocate among the public for Redgate, and, as Microsoft Data Platform MVPs, we advocate for people to use the Microsoft data platform. At the same time, we advocate for customer needs inside of Redgate, liaising with developers and others to influence what and how they build software. We advocate at Microsoft on behalf of all the customers that want new features and struggle with existing ones.

For all of us, this might be through meetings, presentations, written content, emails, and more. In some sense, we are communicators that move information and knowledge around. All of us have done that throughout our careers, and it’s what many of you do as well. In fact, I think some of the most successful technical professionals I know are great communicators. They many have great technical skills, but they also have the ability to communicate well with others.

I saw a famous software developer once recommend that anyone really wanting to be a developer ought to major in a subject like English (or your language of choice) to learn how to analyze writing and communicate your thoughts back to others. Certainly you need technical skills, but most of us really need to learn how to work well with others. A soft skill, but a vitally important one.

That’s most of my day as an advocate. Communicating. Hopefully many of you find that I do it well and have learned something, been inspired, or even entertained by my work. I look forward to continuing it for many years.

Steve Jones

Listen to the podcast at Libsyn, Stitcher or iTunes.

May 8, 2020
TSQL for Beginners–#RGCommunityCircle
As a part of the Redgate Community Circle, giving back in this strange time, each of the advocates for Redgate is teaching a free course. We’re doing this live each week, according to this schedule:
- Mondays – Intro to SSRS with Kathi Kellenberger
- Tuesdays – Query Performance Tuning with Grant Fritchey
- Wednesdays – Basic T-SQL with Kendra Little
- Thursdays – Live Stairways, DAX and Power BI with me.
I decided to watch a class of each of the others’ work and write about it. This post looks at the first class from Kendra Little on basic T-SQL.

Basic T-SQL

I know a lot of T-SQL, but I also don’t know a lot. I’m good, maybe above average, but not a great query writer. I learn all the time from others, and often find something interesting in basic presentations. I’m also always looking to see how others teach basic topics to improve my own skills.

Kendra has done an interesting thing with putting her course on GitHub. That’s a great idea, though for mine, I am following articles on SQLServerCentral. Having a good outline and resources for students is a good idea, and everyone ought to be able to use a VCS, including GitHub, so I like putting pages here and code in a repo.

Why is that good? This is what I did to start following Kendra’s class:

Now I can open the first script in ADS. On top of seeing how Kendra teaches, I get to practice some ADS stuff.

I like the doorstop at the end, and I’ll have to think about that for my demo scripts. I’ve accidentally run the entire script too many times.

Kendra walks through a number of query concepts with a series of basic SELECT statements, including an emoji for a column alias. I’m glad she lets you know which items are not recommended.

The first course is helping you understand some of the ways in which you can get data from tables. You do need to have a slight understanding of what a table is, but Kendra helps you learn some of the strange ways that you can put together a statement. There is a lot to cover, but this should help someone that wants to learn some basics get started.

There is also homework, included as part of the scripts in the course. The questions are at the bottom, and called out. A good way to get you to practice. I should do this for my work in places as well.

Pass this course along to someone that needs to get better at T-SQL. It’s not too fast or hard, and will let them be sure they have a grounding in good ways to write queries.
May 8, 2020