Voice of the DBA

Tag: syndicated

  • The EU New Stars of Data Come Tomorrow

    One of the things I’ve tried to do when SQL Saturdays is ensure there are lots of local speakers, and new speakers. I’ve argued for more new speakers at the PASS Summit, and I’ve been happy to see them add new ones every year. Speak Idol is fantastic, and I’m glad Denny runs this every year.

    Redgate is sponsoring the New Stars of Data, which is a conference online, tomorrow, 14 Aug, 2020. This is an event built for new speakers.

    The schedule is  great, and I’m looking forward to watching some sessions later. The ones that caught my eye

    Register today, and check out the stars of tomorrow, tomorrow..

  • Daily Coping 11 Aug 2020

    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.

    Today’s tip is to donate some unused items, clothes, tech, etc. to a local charity.

    This has been something I’ve done a few times, and in fact, I had a few bicycles that the kids had outgrown in a shed. I tried to donate them recently, but I missed the donation hours, which had been reduced.

    In writing this tip, I loaded those up and drove them down. This allows them to be used by someone else, at a low price (I donate to Goodwill) and this supports that organization’s efforts.

    BTW, I saw a few friends renovating their kitchens or bathrooms. If you are doing this and have nice cabinets that you are just changing, consider donating to Habitat for Humanity. They will do the deconstruction if the cabinets can be resold.

  • My T-SQL Tuesday #129 Time Capsule

    This month the T-SQL Tuesday invitation comes from tsqltuesdayTamara Clark. I strong-armed Tamara last fall, along with her husband, into hosting this year. She came through, with a great topic given the state of the world.

    She asks us to write about what we’d put in time capsule, the items or information that goes into a #sqlcommunity bucket. In some sense, this invitation reminds me of Brent’s reminder post to himself.

    Memories of 2020

    What do I remember about this year? First, a lot of vacation for me. My employer, Redgate Software, gives a sabbatical every five years. It’s a great perk for employees that stick around, and it has helped me recharge and refresh. I think I was the last one to get a sabbatical this year while the offices were open, however, there are other companies that take care of employees, and my first memory is a reminder of this. Maybe some future person opening this capsule will think about asking their organization for this.

    The second thing is that I won’t go into an office this entire year. I didn’t get any visits before lockdown, and we’ve closed our offices for the year. That’s a first for me in over a decade. However, the next thing I want to remember from this year is that so many companies are realizing that work from home (WFH) not only works, but lots of people are very productive. We can rethink our costs in buildings, commutes, living locations, and more. Redgate has traditionally not allowed anyone to avoid the office. There are a few of us that have been exceptions over the years, but 90% of our employees have been expected to show up at the office every week.

    That’s changed, and it will change our culture and organization in the future.

    The last thing to put in this time capsule is the importance of social contact and togetherness. I’ve missed a lot of this across the five months, to the point I work to see some people locally every couple weeks. I love my family, but I miss the social contact I used to get regularly, whether traveling to a SQL Saturday, visiting an office, maybe working in a library or Starbucks for a few hours, or just at a movie theater.

    We need more social contact, or at least, I do.

  • Fixing Broken Pip

    I’ve got Python 3.8 on my machine, and recently I got a note that my pip version was old. I tried to upgrade PIP recently with this command:

    c:\python38\python.exe -m pip install --upgrade pip

    This resulted in an error. When I got the error, which I didn’t save, I tried again from an admin console, but got this: 

    # c:\python38\python.exe -m pip install --upgrade pip
    c:\python38\python.exe: No module named pip

    That is frustrating. In searching around, I found an issue that a broken upgrade from Windows may cause Pip to get lost. As a result, I need to get pip reinstalled. This post shows how to get this, with a quick curl and python script execution.

    Steve@ARISTOTLE C:\Users\Steve
# curl https://bootstrap.pypa.io/get-pip.py -o get-pip.py
  % Total    % Received % Xferd  Average Speed   Time    Time     Time  Current
                                 Dload  Upload   Total   Spent    Left  Speed
100 1840k  100 1840k    0     0  1840k      0  0:00:01 --:--:--  0:00:01 2103k

Steve@ARISTOTLE C:\Users\Steve
# python get-pip.py
Collecting pip
  Using cached pip-20.2.1-py2.py3-none-any.whl (1.5 MB)
Collecting wheel
  Downloading wheel-0.34.2-py2.py3-none-any.whl (26 kB)
Installing collected packages: pip, wheel
Successfully installed pip-20.2.1 wheel-0.34.2

Steve@ARISTOTLE C:\Users\Steve
# pip install tweepy

    That worked, and allowed me to do what I wanted, which was get the tweepy module.

    Now to do a little Python work.