Voice of the DBA

Tag: syndicated

  • Daily Coping 17 Aug 2022

    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 check in with someone who may be lonely or feeling anxious.

    I check in with my Mom regularly, as she does live alone. However, she’s not usually anxious about things. On the other hand, I have had a friend that has struggled the last few years. Some health issues, some employment challenges, and then personal struggles. I’ve made it a point to periodically just reach out.

    I did this again this week, just to see how they were feeling and if they were coping with life. I don’t think they’re lonely or anxious anymore, but it’s good to check.

  • Daily Coping 16 Aug 2022

    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 thank someone you’re grateful to and tell them why.

    One of the things I’ve seen recently is a thank you series from Grant, letting people know how he appreciates them in his life. I like that, and he’s made some nice choices. All of those people have impacted my life as well.

    While I have many people, I’m choosing one for this post. Erin Stellato is someone I’ve known a long time. I don’t know exactly when we met, but I have many memories:

    • Being a gracious host at a Cleveland SQL Saturday and hanging out with her and her daughter by the slide in the building.
    • Sitting in the lobby of the Seattle convention center chatting about something SQL Server.
    • Doing yoga together in a class before some event
    • Skiing with her family and grandfather in Colorado
    • running through the streets of Bellevue in the morning before the MVP Summit

    Lately, however, I’m really grateful for some counsel from her on diversity and harassment issues. These are not pervasive, but they are present in the SQL Community (and others). My perspective and view is limited, and I have asked others for help in finding a way forward to prevent future incidents. Erin has been great about listening and give me things to think about.

    I’m really grateful for her help on a very difficult topic.

    I’m also grateful for her friendship and hope we find time for some future yoga, skiing, or some other fun activity.

  • Slides from SQL Saturday Los Angeles 2022

    If you attended my talk at SQL Saturday Los Angeles 2022, then you can get my slides here: Adopting a DevOps Process for your Database.

  • Creating a HEAD utility for Windows 10

    One of the things I did often in my first career job was create utilities that we could use as a network support team. I was an intern coming from university, where I used SunOS and Solaris all the time. I was used to a command line for a lot of work. While DOS worked well, there were things I missed, like whoami, head, tail, etc.

    I rebuilt a bunch of those as DOS batch files for myself, but I expanded this to more useful things. We supported over 1000 people, and finding their phone extensions was a pain, especially in the early 1990s with phones that had cords and pagers. We had a common file share that contained a text phone directory, so I built 411.bat, which took a parameter and searched that file for a matching name. Then returned the line of data. It was immensely helpful to us.

    The other day I had a large file that I wanted a glimpse of. I opened it in Notepad++ (this was GBs of data), but it took time. That made me think I’d really like HEAD on Windows. I tried it, but it’s not there.

    So I built it. This is my command file:

    powershell “get-content %1 | select-object -first 10”

    I save this in a utilities folder in my path. Then in other folders, I can run it and get a glimpse of text files I’m importing or working with. Way, way faster than Excel or trying to open this in another program. I often have a cmd open, so this is useful to me. You can see it working below.

    2022-08-04 08_55_24-C__utilities