This week, I had the opportunity to be the moderator for Joseph Barth’s (blog|twitter) 24 Hours of PASS Summit Preview session about Azure Data Factory V2. It was fun, easy, and I encourage you to sign up to do the same! Throughout the year, PASS hosts a number of online learning events. 24 Hours of PASS and virtual chapter webinars being the most common/visible. And in each session, the presenter needs a little help managing questions and watching the clock so they can focus on delivering their great content.

I really enjoy my job. I became a full-time production DBA about 14 months ago and it has been an overwhelmingly positive move. I work for a good company and with a terrific group of people. Many days, I have to force myself to leave the office because I was so engrossed in a task and just didn’t want to set it aside. But there’s something that not everyone might consider before taking on this job.

Triggers can be really useful in your database but you have to be careful with them. We often use them to record history to a separate table (at least, until we can implement temporal tables) or keep track of when a record was last updated. It’s usually implemented via an AFTER UPDATE trigger. Several times a day, I’m alerted by our monitoring suite that two processes were deadlocked. This is a (mostly) normal event, but one that we’d like to avoid if we can.

This week I had a user come to me asking about how fields were defined on a few tables he was using in writing some reports. Long story short, he’s been tasked with writing some new reports and updating existing ones, but he doesn’t have visibility to the database itself so he’s left with the “ok, let’s try this” approach and then reading error messages to debug when things go sideways.

Every year, I spend the Sunday after SQL Saturday Rochester scanning & processing raffle tickets for our wonderful sponsors. Here’s how the system works: Attendees get tickets (one ticket per sponsor) with their name, the sponsors name, and a QR code on them The QR codes represents a URI, unique to the combination of event, attendee and sponsor. Attendees drop their tickets in a box to enter the sponsor’s raffle prize drawing When the URI from the QR code is accessed, it registers in the SQL Saturday system Organizers run a report for each sponsor that includes the contact info of all attendees who dropped off a raffle ticket, then email the report to the sponsor It works pretty well, but the hangup is that most QR scanners will open your web browser (or prompt you to open it) to the URL on each scan.

A couple weeks ago Carlos L. Cachon (blog|twitter) put out a call on Twitter looking for SQL Saturday organizers to join him on the SQL Data Partners Podcast. When I signed on to record, I learned that Chris Hyde (blog|twitter) and Eugene Meindinger (blog|twitter) were joining us. I’ve met and spoken with all three previously, so it was easy talking to everyone and I thought the conversation flowed well. Check out SQL Data Partners Podcast Episode 126: SQLSaturday Edition.

This month’s T-SQL Tuesday from Aaron Bertrand gives us a choice: Life beyond the technical in a search for what Drew with the Burdensome Name calls #sqlibrium Your own T-SQL bad habits And I’ve got one, maybe two posts in progress on the first topic. Alas, ironic that being swamped with work is blocking me from writing my #sqlibrium #TSQL2sday post — Andy Levy (@ALevyInROC) February 12, 2018 Thanks to Eugene Meidinger (blog|twitter) for nudging me in the direction of posting this.

I need a new social media profile picture. That’s one of the most important (non-technical) conclusions I drew from my week at PASS Summit 2017. It seemed like everywhere I went, I heard “I didn’t recognize you without the hat!” The picture I use on Slack, Twitter and Instagram is the same one I use here on my About Me page. This photo was taken in 2014 at the West Bend, WI Cache Bash and it’s one of the few photos of myself that I actually like (harsh shadows aside).

I wrote a post over on the dbatools website about how to get involved with improving comment-based help Working on the CBH is a great way to get started with the dbatools project, even (especially) if you’re not a PowerShell expert or MVP-level DBA. Getting everything clean and consistent in the CBH is an important step on the road to 1.0. Along the way, you’ll pick up on how dbatools is put together, discover functions that you can use in your day-to-day work, and get a feel for PowerShell best practices.

In the course of testing a major upgrade, one of my users in Accounting happened upon a problem with one of her scenarios. The web app we were working on had a habit of “locking up” on people when loading some pages; in most cases, it was because the server was pushing a huge HTML table to the client, and most web browsers struggle when faced with several megabytes of markup and thousands of rows in a single table.