Voice of the DBA

Tag: syndicated

  • Daily Coping 26 Apr 2021

    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 spend less time sitting today. Stand, walk, move more.

    I ended last week looking to do some activity. Today, it’s just less sitting.

    That’s a challenge for me these days. It shouldn’t be, and I do get some exercise most days, but I find myself sitting for long stretches. I raise my standing desk less often, mostly because I think I’m a bit worn out from life.

    However, I’m making a small effort today. I’m taking more breaks and walking to the kitchen, upstairs, doing a touch more movement in the house. I am also trying to find a few minutes here and there to avoid sitting, and standing while in a meeting or watching some video content from our various updates.

    I know sitting isn’t great, but with life beating me down, I just want to sit. I don’t know I’ll change much, but I am making a bit more effort to try and get above 1000 steps by the end of the workday if I haven’t gone anywhere.

  • Mental Health Day from the WIT Group

    The pandemic of the last year has been a difficult time for many individuals and organizations. I know that I have had a number of ups and downs across the year.

    The Women in Technology virtual group is putting on a one day event, full of talks from a variety of speakers on Mental Health and Wellness. The event is on May 7, 2021, from 8am EDT to 6pm. You can register and attend, as well as view the schedule from the link above.

    I was asked to submit a talk, after publishing a year of coping tips at SQLServerCentral. It was an honor, and an interesting challenge. I’m not an expert in this area by any stretch, but I have had some struggles and worked through my own challenges, often with the help of the tips I published for others.

    I’ll be talking at 11:10am EDT, going over some of how the year has gone for me and the ways that I’ve tried to ensure life is still, well, enjoyable.

    Join me if you want something different. I’m certainly looking to some of the other talks from people that are sharing some of the experiences on the non-technical part of our lives.

  • Daily Coping 23 Apr 2021

    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 make time to run, walk, bike, swim, dance, cycle, stretch, or some other activity.

    I’ve been trying to do more outside as the weather changes. Some chores, but also moving some exercise outdoors. I was lucky with an extended summer last year that had yoga and swimming outdoors, but since that ended in early October, it’s been mostly indoor yoga, weight lifting, and biking. The few times I have hiked, walked, or biked outside, it’s often been chilly or overcast.

    With that in mind, I decided to go walk to the mailbox for a few days. That doesn’t sound like a lot, but my mailbox is a half mile from my house. I took dogs, leashed them when we left the property, and had a few nice jaunts, even in not great weather.

    A nice break in the middle of a couple days.

  • T-SQL Tuesday #137–Wrap Up

    I hosted the blog party this month, with the invite to write about notebooks. These are a neat technology, and I’ve written about them at SQLServerCentral.

    This post is a wrap-up of the various responses to my invitation. First, quite a few people give credit to either Aaron Nelson or Rob Sewell for their writings and work with notebooks, so check out their blogs.

    With that, Rob’s post this month has a number of links to his notebook work and a list of how he has used them with clients.

    Aaron has kids, lots of them, and they keep him busy. However, he asked his entry this month to be a video where he discusses parameterizing notebooks.

    Rob Farley talks about executing a notebook from Powershell, which to me is one of the key components that makes notebooks usable for something besides teaching.

    Glenn Berry has a fantastic set of diagnostic DMV queries that are incredibly useful for anyone administering a SQL Server instance. He writes about his queries being bundled up in a notebook.

    Chris Johnson was disappointed his organization didn’t adopt notebooks, but found another use. He makes notes to help learn new T-SQL features in notebooks and has a Github repo with them in it.

    Benni De Jagere is rewriting some scripts into notebooks (with the help of PoSh and Bing), starting with extracting Power BI logs into csv files. Hopefully we’ll see him give a presentation on this process sometime in the future.

    Deepthi Goguri writes about how notebooks work, including giving us some magical commands that you might consider adding to your notebooks.

    Barney Lawrence uses notebooks often at work on a regular basis. One of his tasks is a notebook to run git commands for branches. He has also converted a series of blog posts on XML into notebooks that you can use to follow along with his posts.

    Andy Cutler writes about testing the flow of presentations in a notebook. He embeds images near the code to help walk through the process of setting up Synapse.

    Deborah Melkin writes about her challenges getting started, similar to mine. She is using these for some PoSh scripts, but the challenge of running some cells to set up variables and then other ones to do some work. The big win is keeping similar scripts together and documented with text around the code cells. She would like to see some things like execution plans, and I agree.

    Justin Bird has played with them, but not much use in practice. He did some research and learning after the invite and shares some thoughts.

    Julie Koesmarno tells us how she challenged herself to work on Python and microeconomics to build a chart that displays some data. Notebooks help her quickly get hands on and become a better learner. A great use of notebooks.

    Martha Clancy has a few ideas to make notebooks a part of your daily work. Some good tips in there in her humorous flow, which doesn’t sound great, but it shows there is some value in thrashing around a bit.

    Chris Voss tells us the best use he’s found. He puts a number of scripts together with documentation, even  when he can’t run the the code. A colleague can. He also would like to see execution plans in notebooks.

    Mikey Bronowski gives a few scenarios where he has found notebooks to be useful, notably learning and improving processes.

    Hugo Kornelis takes the approach that Microsoft is pushing notebooks a little too much, even in places they may not be appropriate, but he has a few use case: production support, data analysis, and presentations. Another vote for execution plans in notebooks.

    VR expert Todd Kleinhans uses notebooks to work with GPUs, SQL Server on Linux, containers, and RAPIDS. Quite a technical list.

    Linda Kovacheva discovered how powerful notebooks can be with Azure Machine Learning.

    Kevin Chant has been using notebooks for a number of things in the Azure Data Engineering Services at Microsoft.

    That’s the wrap. If I’ve missed anyone, let me know and I’ll update the post.