I’ve been a proponent of dbatools for close to a year now and even contributed to the project, but surprisingly haven’t been a heavy user of it. Mostly due to a lack of opportunity. I’m aware of many of the functions by virtue of working on the built-in documentation and following the project and presentations about it.

So when the need arose to move a development/test instance of SQL Server from a VM onto a physical server, I knew exactly what I wanted to do. I was warned that the contents of this instance had been moved once before and it resulted in over a week of work and a bunch of trouble. I can’t speculate on why this was as I wasn’t there to see it, but I wasn’t going to let that happen on my watch. So, with equal parts hubris and stubbornness (and a dash of naïveté), I dove in. We have the technology. We will migrate this thing.

One of the (many) fun things to do at PASS Summit is to check out the ribbons people have attached to their badges. Some are witty or goofy, others informational, others technical, and still more that let you express how you identify with a community within the community.

To celebrate dbatools and the awesome team & community around it, two limited edition badges will be available from/distributed by me and a handful of other folks all week at Summit. Check ’em out:

This month’s T-SQL Tuesday is hosted by Rob Sewell and he’s posed the following question:

What are you going to automate today with PowerShell?

I’m cheating a little bit in that this is something I did a couple weeks ago, but it was immensely helpful. I’d been working on building out a new instance to migrate our test databases onto, but the developers had an urgent need to do some testing in isolation so they “borrowed” that new instance. But we had an additional requirement - the configuration needed to match production as closely as possible, more than our current test instance. Of course, I reached for PowerShell and dbatools.

While working on an enhancement to dbatools, I had a need to stash a local copy of a file downloaded from the internet, but in a safe place that I could reasonably expect to be safe from accidental deletion.

• User’s home directory? Maybe, but it’ll be clutter, the user might see it appear and fear that they’ve got malware. And likely deleted ina “cleanup” effort.

• Create my own directory somewhere on the file system? See above.

I’ve recently started contributing to the dbatools project and it’s all done through GitHub. Prior to this, I’d never used git and GitHub for anything more than an offsite repository for my own small repositories (I’ve used Subversion for over a decade) and I never totally understood how it worked in a large collaborative project until this came along.

I’m putting this together here for my own reference and to hopefully write it up in a way that helps things “click” for some people who need that extra nudge to get into “aha!” territory. A number of the examples I’ve seen elsewhere have mixed the command-line and GUI clients, but the more I use git GUIs, the less I like them for the basic workflow. You only need to know a handful of commands to be productive and for that, the command line beats the GUI in my opinion.

This month’s T-SQL Tuesday is hosted by Raul Gonzalez and he’s asked everyone to share things we might be a bit embarrassed about:

For this month, I want you peers to write about those important lessons that you learned the hard way, for instance something you did and put your systems down or maybe something you didn’t do and took your systems down. It can be also a bad decision you or someone else took back in the day and you’re still paying for it…

Earlier this week I was working on adding a new feature to Update-DbaTools and while looking at another cmdlet to check syntax/conventions, I noticed an ugly typo in some of the help for it. 100% perfect prose isn’t necessary in the comment-based help for PowerShell cmdlets, but seeing misspellings and such kind of bugs me. Fortunately this is something I can help fix since the module is on Github.

First I needed to find a spell-checker that works with Visual Studio Code to help me spot misspellings. This was slightly trickier than expected, as I use macOS at home and at least one of the first plugins I found was Windows-only. I finally settled on Code Spellchecker.

A few weeks ago I was looking at a query and got tripped up by the network and my own forgetfulness. It was a pretty simple query with a simple-looking execution plan. It didn’t even do that much work. About 20K logical reads and returned 200K records. For a server as large as the one I was working with, this should have been nothing. Instead, was waiting three minutes to get my results. My first thought was “aha, this query must need tuning, maybe a new index.”

Recently I was working on a bit of PowerShell to download the awesome First Responder Kit from Brent Ozar Unlimited. The canonical URL for the FRK is http://firstresponderkit.org/ but that’s a redirect to the GitHub repository where all the magic happens. I thought to myself:

Self! Rather than take a chance on that GitHub URL changing, use the “main” URL and Invoke-WebRequest will take care of the redirect for you.

So off to the PowerShell prompt I went and ran Invoke-WebRequest -Uri http://firstresponderkit.org/ to start looking at the object returned so I could see what I needed to parse out to find my way to the true download URL.

Kevin Hill mentioned this idea/series on a SQL community slack channel back in April and I thought it would be a good way to get back to blogging. The timing worked out well as I had just started a new job, my first with the official title of “SQL Server DBA.” So how’d I get here?

School

In college, I took a single database course. I’d messed around with Microsoft Access a bit, but wanted to get a better handle on what I was doing. The course was not at all what I was expecting. I passed and did OK, but I didn’t completely grasp the material. The class was mostly deep RDBMS theory including “how do we store this on disk” - I wrote minimal amounts of SQL in this course because it wasn’t required.