Voice of the DBA

Tag: syndicated

Friday Flyway Tips–Navigating in Flyway Desktop

Flyway Desktop changed the navigation and a few people were surprised. I was as well, so I decided to do a short tip on the changes.

This is part of a series of posts on Flyway.

The Old Flyway Desktop

If you’ve been following these tips, or worked with the Flyway Enterprise system, you’ve encountered Flyway Desktop, and you might have seen something that looked like this, with the navigation across the top of the screen. We see four “tabs”, called Schema model,
Generate Migrations, Migrations, and Version Control:

As part of a design refresh, we moved the version control tab to the right side as a bar, which shrinks it, but also gives information while a developer is working. I covered this in a previous tip. You can see that design below.

We weren’t done and I was surprised how quickly we made another change.

Flyway Desktop v7

This was actually in v7.0.5, which released Jan 11. We moved all the tabs to the side, though this time the first three moved to the left. As you can see below, I have the migrations tab selected and the nav is on the side panel.

The same three tabs are there, but now on the left, and what’s more, I can shrink this panel to a bar, which gives me more room in which to see code and work with my changes. The VCS tab is still on the right, with icons to let me know when I have changes to push, pull, or fetch.

Summary

This might not seem like much, but it’s a nice visual change and it gives us the ability to add more features in tabs, without running out of room or squeezing things at the top. Over time, a few more pieces of functionality will appear here as we continue to expand the capabilities of the tool.

Try Flyway Desktop out today. If you haven’t worked with Flyway Desktop, download it today. There is a free version that organizes migrations and paid versions with many more features.

Video Walkthrough

I made a quick video showing this as well. You can watch it below, or check out all the Flyway videos I’ve added:

February 2, 2024
A New Word: Tarrion

tarrion – n. an odd interval of blankness you feel after something big happens to you bt before you feel the resulting emotional reaction – stunned by a sudden loss, a stroke of luck, or an unexpected visitor – like those tension-filled seconds between a flash of lightning and the thunderclap that follows..

I don’t have a lot of big things happening in my life. No great joys, but not great sorrows (usually). However, I know I’ve had this a few times. I had one last year, which I don’t want to disclose, but I got some news and I missed the next few sentences. I was stunned, and didn’t know how to react. A few seconds later the emotion hit me.

This seems like a very common reaction to big news, and while I appreciate the excitement for some things, I’m glad I don’t feel tarrion too often with sad news.

From the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows

February 2, 2024
THAT Conference 2024–Austin

This week I attended THAT Conference in Round Rock, just outside Austin, Texas. This was my second time attending the conference, which is a very unique. The conference runs twice a year, once in the summer in Wisconsin Dells, WI, and in the winter in Round Rock. These are put on by the THAT community, which reminds me a bit of the PASS/SQL Family.

I was honored to get accepted to speak at THAT Conference 2023 in Wisconsin, and I had a great time. I knew nothing about the event, but my wife and I had a great time. This week I was again honored to speak and I had another great time, so I decided to share some thoughts and pictures.

Theme

The conferences from THAT, apart from having fun with the name, are camping themed. Really summer camp themed, as in a US kids summer camp. The organizers decorate a lot of things camp-related, including the rules and a to-do list as you walk in.

There are lots of camping gear set up around the convention center as well. Here are a few shots from the summer event. I didn’t grab camping shots this week.

The main stage in the convention center also has outdoor camp decorations. I like that the main stage is always open, with multiple keynotes during the day, as well as recordings and interviews taking place during the day. I wish we did that at the Data Community Summit.

Attendees are “campers” and speakers are “counselors”. That’s even on our badges. They also give you a pin code, which relates to your information. You can give a sponsor your pin and then they can access your contact details. It’s fairly clean and easy, easier than scanning badges, IMHO.

They also have a large poster commemorating the event, and they ask people to sign. I signed this week for the Jan 2024 event. Can you find me?

Here was the list of previous events displayed in WI.

The Kalahari Resort

Both events take place at the Kalahari Resorts. Apparently people in Wisconsin know about this place. It’s a large hotel/water park, with lots of African themed art and decorations, indoor and outdoor water parks, and a convention center.

The Wisconsin Dells location is older, and more spread out, but a lot of the same restaurants and options. There is an indoor amusement part and movie theater at the complex, which is on the edge of a very small town north of Madison. I flew into Madison and drove a little under an hour through the Wisconsin trees to get there.

The Austin location is in Round Rock, a suburb of Austin, and has lots of stuff around their property. I didn’t explore as much, but I didn’t see an indoor amusement part or movie theater. However, it is newer and nicer, with one large building for hotel rooms.

The rooms are nice, large, and there are multiple bedroom options for families. They also give you a plastic wristband with an RFID sensor in there. This is your room key and can be used to charge things. It’s a very cool idea, and works well with a water park (and kids).

Program

THAT Conference is a developer event, and it focused on building software. Lots of talks on all aspects of development, but there are a few data sessions and quite a mix of career advice/growth sessions. I was pleased with the mix.

Wisconsin had more data sessions, and I also went to a few RDBMS and NoSQL sessions as well as a Rust talk, a GitHub Actions talk, and a few other random ones. I was pressed in Texas, and it was smaller, so I only went to a DevContainer talk and a GH Custom Actions talk. I learned a bunch in both, including a few things I want to try out.

Open Spaces

I’ve attended a few “DevOps Conferences” over the years, and in some of these they’ve held Open Spaces sessions. This is a format where someone, or anyone, can find a space and start a topic that they are interested in, want to share something, or want to see what others think.

At THAT, they set up these large boards, with a grid. There are times down the side and spaces set across the top. These are sometimes numbered tables in an area, or they could be rooms. They even break after lunch for an hour dedicated specifically to open space time.

Some people will fill out a topic and post it during lunch the first day, reserving a place and time later. Anyone can do this anytime and some speakers do this after their sessions, dropping a note in a space and then going to a table or location and continuing the discussion on their topic.

After our sessions in WI, Ryan actually set one up for the next day to continue a database DevOps talk.

There are also all sorts of other talks. One dev did a talk on making coffee on the road with an AeroPress, and he demonstrates how to do it. Another did a lockpicking talk, which was neat.

The guy got me to practice and I opened a lock in a few minutes. Cool and scary.

I think Open Spaces are neat, because they allow the conference to have sessions (and talks) on topics attendees care about and the organizers didn’t pick. I’d love to see this at Summit. I could see MVPs, skilled attendees that think of something, even vendor SEs taking a space to talk in more detail about something with others.

Family Friendly

With this being a resort with bedrooms available and a waterpark, it’s a great place for kids. However, many of us tech people want our kids interested in stuff. The conference sells tickets at a discount for families to attend. Kids can walk around and play in the tents, mess with Legos or puzzles that are around the event.

We even have kids running Open Spaces. I saw a Pokemon Go session in WI with a range of kids from 6 to 15 chatting. In TX, a girl announced she wanted to have a session to talk about the Barbie movie.

The tickets for kids or family are $99 and that gets them into the various food times as well as the game night. Having your kids exposed to geeks having fun might be one of the best ways to get them interested in STEM. Even if they don’t like the tech, they can have some fun outside the conference as well.

There’s even a family track where people are presenting kid friendly sessions on different topics during the day.

I even saw one Dad with a toddler, probably 10months old, feeding him while listening to a GH talk. That’s cool to see, and I wish I’d have been able to bring a little kid to some events. Not all, but some.

The summer event is scheduled, and tickets are on sale. If you want to attend a fun developer event, perhaps take your family, and visit a water slide, think about going to THAT Conference Wisconsin 2024. I’m not submitting to many events this year, but I am thinking to submit here again.

February 1, 2024
DBAs, Give Git a Try – Getting Started
One of the really interesting things over the last decade is both the rise of Git as the main VCS system for most projects, and the number of people who know nothing about it. Many of the latter seem intimidated, which is both interesting and strange to me. I usually think of technologies as ready to experiment, but I find more and more they only experiment in narrow boundaries.

This post outlines a quick way to get started with Git.

This is part of my series on git that is designed to help people get started using version control in their daily work. You can see all my other posts on Git as well.

Installation

Got to git.scm.org and download git for your platform. This is an easy install, and you should be able to follow the instructions. For Windows, this is a standard install. You might need to restart any CMD windows to get git in the path.

If you’re on a corporate managed laptop, make sure you verify with your IT group this is allowed. That’s a good practice to get into for any software as anything you add increases your attack surface area. It’s another thing to patch and manage. I’d also document that process for yourself (and your blog). Do so in a way that doesn’t expose corporate info, please.

Tracking Code

Once you’ve installed Git, what do you do with it? Well, the easy thing to do is start tracking and versioning SQL scripts for most of us. If you’re a DBA/sysadmin/Ops person, you likely are often writing and editing scripts for your job. Let’s track those.

First, if you use SSMS, you often end up storing lots of code in C:\Users\%user_name%\Documents\SQL Server Management Studio. Let’s change that. In your Documents folder (C:\Users\way0u\Documents\ for me), create a “Git” folder. That gives me an organized places for repos.

Now, let’s create a folder under here for storing my random scripts. Don’t worry about being perfect here, just get started. So, I’ll make an “SSMS” folder. The easy way to do this is open a CMD window and navigate to Git. Then run “mkdir ssms” here. You can see me doing this below.

You can do this from Explorer (right click, new folder), but practicing the CLI is a good skill. Plus, we will need the CLI below.

Once in this folder, run “git init” to make this a Git repository. This starts tracking files. You can see this below, as well as my copy of the files in the SQL Server Management Studio folder. That might be easier to do with the Explorer GUI, but knowing how to navigate is a skill as well. See my ..\.. as a way to move around folders.

I only have one file there because, well, most of my work is tracked in Git. I’m actually sad I have even one file here. In any case, I now have files in this folder (I made up a few more).

What I want to do is start tracking these. If I run a “git status”, I see this:

I see my three .sql files as untracked. This just means Git won’t manage these for now. I need to “add” them. I can do this with “git add <filename” for each one (learn how to use the tab key here), or I can just use “git add –all”. I usually do that since often I want to grab all changes.

Once I do that, I’ll run status, and you can see them as tracked, but not committed. For non-color blind people the filenames changed from red above to green below.

Now I can commit this and stamp a version. It’s a good idea when you think the file is changed to commit them. Not on every save, but once I think the file is changed the way I want it. For admin scripts, I usually commit once whatever I’m working on is changed appropriately, which might mean I close a ticket or a client says what I did was correct.

You can run git commit, which will open a default editor. For me, I often use the CLI and do a git commit -m “message” for the commit. The “message” is why you changed something. Here, I’ll just note this is the first commit.

When I run status, it says nothing to commit, meaning no changed files.

Now as I save scripts, I’ll run through the “git add –all”/”git commit -m message” flow each time I make changes.

One last thing to do.

Fixing SSMS

The last thing is to configure SSMS to save random scripts here. To do this, go into the options and then pick Projects and Solutions and then Locations. You can see this below with the top location set to the original folder where my script was located.

I want to change that to my repo. Browse or edit the path.

Now when I create and save random scripts, they’ll go into my repo.

That’s it.

Summary

This showed how to get started saving your random scripts into a git repo. Over time, you might want to organize things better, especially for project or app work, but for now, this will track your scripts over time.

In future posts, I’ll go over these topics to help you get better with working on these scripts.
- Using VSCode to manage your repo
- Seeing history and recovering previous versions of scripts
- Sharing scripts with others
If there are other things you don’t understand or want to learn, please leave a comment below and I’ll answer (and write a post).
January 31, 2024