For T-SQL Tuesday this month, Alex Yates (blog | twitter) gives us this challenge:

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I would like you to write about something in your IT career that you have changed your mind about. What was your original opinion? Why did you believe that? What do you believe now? Why did you change your mind?

You are welcome to discuss technical or non-technical topics. Feel free to go as deeply technical or as personal and human as you like. Brain-melting technical posts about the inner workings of the SQL engine or effective machine learning architectures in Azure are great. SQL 101 posts or perspectives on age old debates such as tabs and spaces or where to put your commas are great too. Human posts about effective teamwork or diversity or wellbeing in tech are also great.

It’s time once again to prepare ourselves for the endurance test that is PASS Summit, November 5-8. I’ve participated in the Summit Buddies program the past two years, but am taking this year off from it. Instead, I’m collecting information I’ve sent to to my buddies ahead of past Summits and posting it here on my blog, in hopes that it helps folks out. This is going to be broken down into a couple posts.

I’ve found myself traveling quite a bit this year, with more travel on the horizon. Like many, I travel with a fair bit of technology and of course that means keeping things charged - both on the go and at rest.

And, like a lot of folks, before every trip I found myself running around the house collecting cords, chargers and adapters to toss into a Ziplock bag. Then unpacking and returning them to their correct places when I got home. It works, but what a pain!

It’s early September, which means it’s time for T-SQL Tuesday! This month’s topic comes from Kevin Chant (blog | twitter). Our mission, should we choose to accept it (click the image to see the original invite):

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Recently I’ve had to submit suggestions to Microsoft about Azure DevOps and SQL Server.

I will admit a couple of the suggestions had certainly been in my head for a while. In fact, I wish I had suggested them sooner.

This is Part 3 in a three-part series. Please see Part 1 and Part 2 for more.

What does your average day look like?

I’m going to punt to my “A Day in the Life” series here.

When you started, did you know what your position was going to look like 1 month, 6 months, 1 year, 5 years from then? How accurate has that been so far?

I’ve only been at my current job for about 2 1/2 years, but I can speak to the shorter intervals. I’m going to be intentionally vague in spots here as I don’t want to disclose too much.

This is Part 2 of a series. Please see [Part 1]/2019/09/03/qa-dealing-with-thousands-of-databases/) for the background and more.

What is the most unexpected experience you’ve had in this position?

I have two answers to this question.

1. I write more dynamic SQL in any given week than I had previously in my career - all years combined!

2. Many DBAs deal with issues around parameter sniffing and plans being stuck in cache that don’t work well for a number of their requests as a result. This hasn’t been an issue for me because my plan cache is constantly churning and the majority of queries are ad-hoc. I usually see 75-90 percent of my cached plans being created within the previous few hours, although that number has been changing lately as we’ve been shipping query optimizations the past few months.

This is part one of a three-part series.

I’ve mentioned in various places, including in blog posts on occasion, that my production SQL Server instance hosts several thousand (nearly 9000 as of this writing) databases. People are usually surprised to hear this and it often leads to interesting conversation.

Jon Shaulis asked me on Twitter recently:

And I realized that I haven’t ever sat down to address this in detail. I’ve spoken about it on the SQL Data Partners Podcast and written little bits here and there on the blog in the context of “here’s something that tripped me up” but I haven’t really sat down to write specifically about the topic.

It feels like SQL Saturday Albany just wrapped up, but I have another announcement to make. I am proud to announce that I have been selected to speak at SQL Saturday Boston on September 14th, 2019. I will be presenting “Keys to a Healthy Relationship with SQL Server” at 11:15 AM.

Abstract

Developers and DBAs have had a long, sometimes strained relationship. Some developers see DBAs as roadblocks standing in the way of getting their work shipped; some DBAs see developers as agents of chaos bent on ruining their perfect database environments.

This is my fourth installment in a series responding to Steve Jones’s (blog | twitter) #SQLCareer challenge. I jotted down most of what I did through the day, filling a page and then some in a small notebook with timestamps and short reminders of what happened. For more, check out the #SQLCareer hashtag on Twitter.

Background

I bet you thought I’d forgotten all about this “project”. I decided to pick things back up on this day because I’ve been light on content lately, I had a few things going on, and keeping notes for this series strangely helps me focus on my day. As it turned out, there were a few twists in the story of my Friday.

Thanks to everyone who came out to see dbatools for the Uninitiated at SQL Saturday Albany on July 20th, 2019. I had a lot of fun sharing dbatools with you and hope you’re ready to start exploring on your own!

The slides and demo scripts are available in my GitHub repository.

If you have any questions about the session, please feel free to contact me via:

• Email
• Slack (@alevyinroc)
• Twitter