Voice of the DBA

Tag: T-SQL Tuesday

  • T-SQL Tuesday Live–31 Mar 2020

    I’m hosting another live T-SQL Tuesday event tomorrow, which is really just a casual video meeting for anyone that wants to join and take a break from work, life, or anything else.

    In this time of difficulty, I think this is a great coping mechanism that might help you keep in touch with the community. I know it’s certainly good for my mental health.

    This week the theme is: Securely connecting

    Most of us are remote now, and we’re often at home. This can prevent some challenges. Networking aside, security is still a concern. What you are doing? Jump boxes, rdp to servers or your desktop at work or something else?

    We’ll start with this theme, but we’ll see where the conversation goes. We’ll also do a health check with people, talk about anything good that’s happened?

    I’ll use Zoom with this meeting URL: Removed (see the most recent post for the URL)

    The date: Tuesday, March 24, 2020, and time:

    • 13:00MDT
    • 15:00EDT
    • 19:00UTC

    Just an hour. Jump on, say hi, give us your thoughts, problems, or just listen.

  • T-SQL Tuesday Live–A Neat Solution

    Travel is limited, or banned, in many cases these days. Events are cancelled or postponed, and there is a limit to how much contact we should have with each other. That’s hard in many ways, and it’s a challenge.

    I’ve been working at home for 17 years and it’s hard for me. This is a big change and there’s a need for adjustment for many of us, myself included. To give you a chance to step away from work, I’m taking a page from Mike Walsh and Straightpath Solutions. I’m going to set up a T-SQL Tuesday live meeting on Tuesday. I’m going to take an hour during the time I’d often eat lunch and run a virtual water cooler and run a virtual T-SQL Tuesday live meeting.

    I’ll use Zoom with this meeting URL: Removed (see the most recent post for the URL)

    The date: Tuesday, March 24, 2020

    • 13:00MDT
    • 15:00EDT
    • 19:00UTC.

    Rather than just a random get together, though we can talk about anything, I’m going to set a base topic and hope some of you come to participate with some thoughts.

    This week, Mar 24, I’m going to set the topic to be this:

    What’s a neat solution you found recently to a problem?

    This could be work related or not. Technical or non-technical. We’ll let the discussion go where it goes.

    If you’re looking for a little community contact, feel free to join me on Tuesdays. I’ll post a new topic each Monday that can think about.

  • T-SQL Tuesday #124–Query Store in Action

    tsqltuesdayToday is T-SQL Tuesday #124 and I’m dropping a quick post as I’ve had lots of other stuff to do since returning from my sabbatical. Tracy Boggiano is the host this time and she asks about Query  Store.

    A Quick Review

    I don’t use Query Store (QDS) much. I don’t have to deal with the production operations much, and really, I’m not supposed to worry about the SSC servers. We sometimes have bad plans and bad code, but it doesn’t affect the performance of the servers overall (we’re over provisioned) and we use SQLServerCentral as part of our SQL Monitor demo site, so we want some bad stuff showing up.

    5129kPl5kCLGrant wrote a book, SQL Server Query Store in Action, that is on the Kindle Unlimited list. Since I subscribe, I grabbed this last year and dug in on a few airplane flights to see if I’d missed anything about how the QDS works.

    It’s a good intro look at what the QDS is, how it works, and how you can get information out of it. Grant does a good job of digging into the DMVs and helping you to understand what happens outside of the SSMS GUI.

    Grant and our host, Tracy, have another Query Store book that goes into more detail ( and it more recent) if you want to learn more.

    Overall, this is a good basic look at QDS. If you want to get started, and subscribe to Kindle Unlimited, give this a look.

  • T-SQL Tuesday Gifts (#121)

    tsqltuesday

    It’s that time of month. I missed last month while traveling, but I wanted to get back in the party. This month, Mala has invited us to talk about the gifts we’ve gotten this year. An easy one for me in 2019.

    Down Under

    The gift for me this year was getting to travel to Australia and New Zealand. I’ve always wanted to go and haven’t been quite able to make it a priority. Last year when I heard we had a Redgate office opening in Australia, I knew this was my chance. We decided to run a few SQL in the City Summit events in 2019 down under and I got to go.

    I was lucky enough to go, and not only attend a few events, but I spent nearly a month in Australia/New Zealand. I spoke at 3 SQL in the City Summits and three SQL Saturdays, which were very enjoyable for me.

    I brought my family along for part of the trip and ended up traveling a little in the middle and taking some holiday. I managed to visit Brisbane, Melbourne, Christchurch, Dunedin, and Queenstown.

    Things went well, and I actually went back to Sydney in September, but just for a couple days. Still, I made the most of it.

    20190926_133919_Burst01

    This was truly a gift for me.