Voice of the DBA

Tag: syndicated

  • Cleveland Rocks! (and does SQL Server)

    My first flight of 2014 will be to Cleveland to run a SQL in the City seminar and then speak at SQL Saturday #241. Both are free events, taking place on February 7th and 8th, respectively, and it’s a great chance for you to improve your SQL Server skills, network, and move your career forward.

    SQL in the City Seminar

    Grant Fritchey and I did SQL in the City seminars last year (and 4 big events) and we kick off 2014 in Cleveland. Come see our Deployment Stairway half day session on Friday, Feb 7, 2014. It’s free, but we’d like you to register.

    We’ll be presenting 3 sessions that build on one another. We’ll set the base with Version Control Systems and databases, giving you some things to think about. We then go into Automated Build and Test, essentially Continuous Integration, which is an amazing process and one you’ll want to get set up in your environment. We finish off with a look at deployments, giving you some ideas on how to smooth and automate this process.

    We’ll cap the afternoon off with a short happy hour, giving you the chance to talk to Grant and myself about anything SQL Server, or anything else.

    SQL Saturday #241

    My second time to a Cleveland SQL Saturday will be #241. I think this is their third or fourth in total, but timing hasn’t worked out well for me. However I’m excited to go back and see friends and meet some new people.

    As an added level of excitement, the T-SQL guru from SQLServerCentral, Jeff Moden, will be speaking. Come learn from one of the masters and speed up your T-SQL code.

    Of course, there will be a ton of other speakers there as well. With 7 tracks and 6 time slots, you’ve got the magic number (and answer to the universe) of sessions to choose from. Speakers from all over the country will be there and you’ll have to really think about how to spend your day.

    I have 2 sessions in the morning. I’ll be talking about encryption at 8:45 and then branding at 11:15. Learn about how to better secure your data and the options that are available for encryption in SQL Server, and then learn about how you can stand out, improve your brand, and find a fantastic job for you.

    My apologies in advance that I won’t make the after party, but my daughter has a volleyball tournament in Colorado on Sunday and I’ll have to leave a little early to catch a plane home Saturday night. However I’ll be around during the day and please feel free to say hi and introduce yourself.

    As I mentioned, both events are free, so if you’re interested in database deployment, sign up for the seminar and if you want to work with SQL Server, register for SQL Saturday.

    Pre-cons

    If you’re looking to be a better DBA and want to learn about the internals of SQL Server and how to better recovery data, think about attending the pre-con from MCM Argenis Fernandez on Friday. It’s an inexpensive training session that will teach you a lot.

    If you want to learn about Powershell, Allen White is putting on an Automation pre-con using PoSh on Friday as well. Learn how to better manage your instances with a little scripting and thought.

  • SQL in Albuquerque

    It’s a little less than two weeks until SQL Saturday #271 – Albuquerque. The second event in that great city, and the beautiful state of New Mexico. I rarely get there now that my brother moved away, but’s always neat to visit.

    I was lucky enough to get chosen to speak and attend the first event last year. When I got my acceptance, a few of us from Colorado got together and planned a #sqlski day on Friday. It worked out well and we have plans to do it again. A few less of us this year, but a few new faces as well. Some of us will be driving to Taos on Thursday night and skiing Friday before driving the rest of the way to Albuquerque.

    This event was a lot of fun last year with an amazing lineup of speakers from all over the country. It was amazing to see how many speakers came from different states, though I do prefer to see more local speakers. Perhaps we’ll inspire a few more New Mexico SQL speakers to jump into the event next year.

    In any case, we have people from Missouri (Bill Fellows), Nebraska (John Morehouse), Texas (Tim Mitchell), Utah (Pat Wright), California (Denny Cherry and Lori Edwards), North Carolina (Bill Pearson) and of course, Colorado. There are at least 13 of us coming down from the north, by my count, and a few more that might be attending.

    I’ll be talking Encryption at the first session at 8am, and from there you have a great choice of lots of other sessions.

    If you’re anywhere near Albuquerque, I’d encourage you to register and come. It will be a fun day of SQL Server learning in New Mexico.

    And it’s FREEEEEEEEE.

    If you want to ski on Friday, keep an eye on the #sqlski hashtag on twitter and we’ll let you know where we are.

  • T-SQL Tuesday #50–Automation

    tsqltuesdayI missed last month and I was a bit sad, but I was traveling the week before and speaking, and then was on vacation. No time to write a post, and it was a tough topic from Robert Davis. However I’m back this month, and I’m thrilled to participate in topic #50.

    This month’s topic comes from @sqlchow who gives us the topic of automation. How would we do it? What would we do? What tools? It’s a great topic.

    This is part of the monthly blog party, started by Adam Machanic. To participate, grab the logo above, write a post on the 2nd Tuesday of the month, and link to the invitation (from @sqlchow this week). If you want to host, contact Adam (blog|twitter).

    Automation

    I’m going to tackle the topic of tools, since I’ve been working on the Powershell Challenge.

    I’ve used lots of tools for automation in my career. I started with DOS and batch files professionally, which were easy for me after a few years of Korn shell and C shell working on Sun OS in college. The idea of scripting in a batch file made perfect sense, so much so that I had alias batch files for various Unix commands, like ls, ps, etc. that I used often. We even had 411.bat on our network, that would grep a text file of our internal phonebook to return extensions.

    As I moved to SQL Server, I found myself frustrated with some of the limitations that SQL had, especially while working with files. Batch files weren’t great, and a full C++ or VB program was too heavyweight. I eventually moved to VBScript, and learned to love the FileSystemObject. I had tried Perl briefly, but abandoned it because getting ActivePerl installed on all machines was too much of a hassle.

    However I’ve started to move to PowerShell (PoSh) and I am starting to really like the idea of quick modules and cmdlets written in the language. It has a lot of the piping and simplicity of Perl, but the power of working with objects. It’s also quick to write scripts. While I find it cumbersome for now, that’s me, not the language.

    These days, if I needed to automate something in SQL Server, I think I’d really look hard at PoSh if I needed to work outside of an instance. Meaning access the host system, work with files, or connect to multiple instances.

    Inside once instance, I still love T-SQL scripting where I can use it.

    One further note, scheduling is an important part of automation. While there are some good enterprise level schedulers, they aren’t always available. That’s why I tend to use the SQL Agent to do lots of scheduling for me. It’s more reliable than the Windows scheduler built into all Windows hosts, and provides some notification capabilities.

    More importantly, I can query the status of my automated tasks.

  • The Powershell Challenge Day 9 – The Pipelines, deeper

    This is part of my Powershell Challenge, to learn more about PowerShell (PoSh) using the Learn Windows Powershell 3 in a Month of Lunches book by Don Jones.

    The authors note this is an optional chapter, one that isn’t necessarily one you need to read. After going through it, I’m not sure I agree, especially as I’m not completely sure I grasp all the contents, though I do think they will be handy.

    When you pipe output from one command to another in Unix, it’s really a text stream. Just as it would be written to stdout, it’s sent to the next command. That means your commands need to handle text as inputs.

    In PoSh, if I understand this, that’s not the case. The inputs into commands are through parameters for the most part. That means that the output from one command, which is a collection of objects, needs to be accepted in the next. For many commands, that doesn’t quite work.

    There are two methods of sending in parameters. One is input ByValue, which is a parameter binding method. In this method, PoSh looks at the type of parameter being sent in, in essence the object type (or data type) and matches to a parameter if the parameter accepts pipeline input. Not all do, and you need to read the HELP for a command to see which parameters accept pipeline input. That seem mis-named to me. It’s ByType, not ByValue in my mind, but I’m certainly not a PoSh expert.

    The other way is ByPropertyName, which is as it implies, by name. The object coming in has its name matched with the parameters of the command on the other side of the pipeline.  That makes more sense, though there are times that the names don’t match.

    That’s where you can then create custom properties with the Select-Object syntax that creates name/value pairs from your input. It looks like handy, not too complex, but cumbersome syntax. I’ll have to play with this more as I had to work through some exercises and carefully watch my parens and braces (opening and closing) as I typed in some commands.

    One thing that frustrated me slightly with these exercises is that a bunch of them looked at multiple machines, and I don’t have a domain at the present time with matching credentials. I couldn’t figure out (easily) how to connect to another machine with custom credentials for Get-Process and Get-Service, but I also was running short of time this lunch, so I skipped.

    The lab was analysis without using PoSh, since many people reading the book might not be admins on a domain. I got most of the answers right, but not always the explanation. I certainly think I need to play with this more, and that means I’ll stand up a domain here soon that I can use. I need to do that anyway.

    The custom properties, along with the introduction of parens for order of operations, make this a must read chapter for me. I think the authors shouldn’t caveat this one at all.