I love this quote from Kevin Hill (and not because he mentions me): 3 things I can no longer justify ignoring: #dbatools Git and #Docker for my dev SQL work@cl@sqldbawithbeard@Kendra_Little and @unclebiguns@GFritchey, I blame you 🤪😂 There’s more but those are top 3— SQL Cyclist (@Kevin3NF) November 9, 2019 The reason being, he's right. I'm spending time rewriting some of my own sample code to use DBATools. I'll try to post some of it here when I get it together. I've been screaming about the importance of containers in general and Docker in particular for quite a while now. Finally, I use Git. So should you. However, getting started with Git, especially in a database, isn't that easy. Kendra Little You might notice Kendra's name in the tweet above. She's one of the smarter, more capable people…
A question that I've seen come up frequently just recently is, how to track CPU use over time. Further, like a disk filling up, people want to know how to predict their CPU usage, so that they can easily decide "now is when I upgrade the hardware". Well, the bad news is, that ain't easy. CPU Use Over Time There are a bunch of ways to look at processor usage. The simplest, and probably most common, is to use the Performance Monitor counters such as '% Processor Time'. Query this, you can get an average of the processor usage at a moment in time. Ta-da! Fixed it. I thought you said this was hard Grant. Well, hang on. Are you running on a single processor machine? If so, cool, maybe…
In April, I said I was going to start learning Jupyter Notebooks. It's November. Let's get going with your first Jupyter Notebook. A quick aside before we start. I think one of the huge strengths that is going to come out of these things is as a runbook. You can share a notebook with someone, they can run the queries on it against their own systems and return the book, with the results to you. That's going to be extremely useful as a troubleshooting tool, but has all sorts of other functionality as well. I strongly suggest you start learning these things, as I am. Azure Data Studio There are a number of ways to create and consume Jupyter Notebooks, but I want to focus on the functionality around data…
For those who don't know, last week was the PASS Summit. It's an amazing event every year, but this last week, I saw a ton of indications that our peers are spotting the changing technology landscape largely defined by three tools, Docker, Git and DBATools. None of those indications resonated quite as much as this tweet from Kevin Hill: 3 things I can no longer justify ignoring: #dbatools Git and #Docker for my dev SQL work@cl @sqldbawithbeard @Kendra_Little and @unclebiguns @GFritchey, I blame you 🤪😂There’s more but those are top 3— SQL Cyclist (@Kevin3NF) November 9, 2019 There are a million things to learn about in our rapidly shifting technological landscape, but I think this assessment, especially the way it was put, "no longer justify ignoring" really nails some of…
So, you say you're a DBA. I say you're not. You say you're a system administrator. I say you're wrong. We are all coders now. Every single one of us. You are a coder. Put down the brick and let me explain. Automation There was a time when I would give a presentation to a room full of people and ask, "Who is using PowerShell right now?" and get, 15 hands out of a hundred. Last week at SQL in the City in London, the same question came up and most of the room raised their hands. What's changed? Automation. Automate all the things!!! The simple fact of the matter is, anything easy, repetitive, and quantifiable is, has been, or shortly will be, automated. You should not be spending your…
There is literally nothing I like better than working on automation. Before we had all the cool toys that we have now, I was working on automating database deployments. Now, with all the cool toys, I'm not automating deployments. I'm automating builds, tests, environment setup, containers, multiple database platforms and more. If you want to learn about DevOps, source control, tools, automation, artifacts, testing and more, I've got an opportunity for you. In just a couple of weeks, on Friday, June 16th, 2019, I'll be teaching an all day seminar on database DevOps. There are some seats left, but don't wait until it's too late. Click here now to get signed up. This is the only time this year that I'll be presenting this course in the United States. If…
In case you can't tell from some of my blog posts, I'm a bit of an advocate for DevOps. I'm extremely fortunate in my employer, Redgate Software, that they are also huge advocates for DevOps. We not only teach it and promote it, and, oh yeah, make AWESOME tools for it, we practice DevOps in what we do. However, this post is not about DevOps. Instead, I'm trying to leverage some of the concepts of DevOps, Continuous Integration, Continuous Deployment, to arrive at some ideas around learning that I want to share. Pi-Hole Yesterday I spent several hours getting the software Pi-Hole set up for my home network. Now, this software really doesn't take several hours to set up. The reason it took me that long is because I hadn't…
I'm starting the process of learning how to use Jupyter Notebooks. Notebooks are documents that contain live code, commentary, results, pictures and more. Jupyter Notebooks are used for presentations, documentation, run books, troubleshooting guides and lots more. Their support within Azure Data Studio opens up lots of opportunities. Azure Data Studio If you're interested in learning about notebooks yourself, or, as I publish the notebooks that I put together and you want to consume them, you need to have a mechanism. There are any number of third party or open source solutions to read notebooks. However, since I'm focused primarily on the Microsoft data platform, I'm using Azure Data Studio to do this work. I've written in the past about using Azure Data Studio (ADS). I also have a bunch…
I've been writing a bunch about Azure Data Studio. I've also been recording videos on the topic. A comment I received recently asked how to export a database from Azure Data Studio. It made me want to explore the topic of exporting a database as it relates to Azure Data Studio. Export? When we say export, what exactly do we mean. It could be as simple as exporting data to a flat file for consumption in Excel or something. It could be creating a backup. Maybe we mean creating a bacpac file. We could also be looking at creating individual scripts for objects within the database. Finally, what about a full export of the database object definitions? Any or all of these could be what the question was about. So,…
There is one truth that I can say about technology with an absolute certainty: It's going to change. Get your learn on! Technology is going to be shifting under your feet, constantly. Even if all you ever do is work with SQL Server, on premises, on hardware, without VMs, containers, clouds or any of that foofaraw, things are going to change. Dealing With Change What's the best way to deal with change? Get your learn on! Learning all the new stuff is absolutely necessary. It's unavoidable. Even if you're not running SQL Server 2019 in production today (and very few of you should be as I write this because it's still in preview) because you're still on SQL Server 2005 (and, by the way, support ended in April of 2016,…