First Things First

Thanks to every who came to my session, Asnwering the Auditor’s Call with Automation. Slides and scripts are posted to my Github.

The Event!

This was Syracuse’s first SQL Saturday was held at the Onondaga County Public Library’s Central Library location, right downtown. This made it a bit of a “homecoming” for me. My first job out of college was across the street from this building and my colleagues and I used to eat lunch in the (no longer there) food court. I haven’t been to this part of downtown Syracuse since 2005, and downtown Syracuse at all since 2019. A lot has changed!

I’m happy to announce that I will be speaking at the first-ever SQL Saturday Syracuse on September 7th, 2024. I will be presenting Answering the Auditor’s Call with Automation

T-SQL Tuesday is a monthly blog party hosted by a different community member each month. This month, Mala Mahadevan (blog) asks how we manage our database-related code.

Where do you keep your database code? Is it in a GIT-based repo, or just in the database the old-fashioned way?

Read on for the rest of the invitation, where Mala expands upon the question (and there is a lot to dig into).

The Problem

While performing an instance migration this spring, I happened upon something I didn’t expect in dbatools. It should have been a simple backup/restore copy of the databases, with the backup files residing on a fileshare on the destination server after being copied there. I kept getting a warning that the backup files I was attempting to restore couldn’t be read, and the restores (via Restore-DbaDatabase) wouldn’t execute.

I checked permissions on the server over and over again. Both on the filesystem and for the share that I was attempting to read from. Even more curious, if I executed the restore database statements directly from within Management Studio, the databases restored without issue.

Earlier this year, I embarked on a bit of a project to tidy up the indexes in a sizeable database. This database has over 900 tables, and there are quite a few indexes which I have long suspected don’t need to exist for a variety of reasons. Some indexes are redundant, others don’t get used, still others could be combined into a single index. By reducing the number of indexes, we can improve write performance in the database, and the size of the database itself. But we have to do it carefully.

T-SQL Tuesday is a monthly blog party hosted by a different community member each month. This month, Kevin Feasel (blog | twitter) asks us about job interview questions.

What is your favorite job interview question? There’s a lot of latitude in how you answer this, and as a spoiler, that’s the type of question I like a lot.

I will be presenting Answering the Auditor’s Call with Automation at two upcoming events, one virtual and one in-person.

1. DBA Fundamentals Virtual User Group Tuesday, April 9 2024 at Noon EDT
2. Capital Area SQL Server User Group on Monday, May 13th at 5:30 PM.

As DBAs, we’re called on regularly to produce documentation for security & compliance audits. Being able to show who has what level of access to an instance is the minimum, but we’re often asked for more. Collecting this information and compiling it into something usable by auditors could take you hours or even days. But with automation, you can pull it all together in a matter of minutes while you’re getting that second cup of coffee from the kitchen.

T-SQL Tuesday is a monthly blog party hosted by a different community member each month. I missed out on January 2024’s edition because I didn’t think I had anything good to talk about, but it suddenly hit me in February so…retroactive T-SQL Tuesday!

For January 2024, Reitse Eskens (blog | twitter) prompts us to talk about our learnings from abandoned or failed projects.

the main intent of this blog is to trigger your stories; what projects did you abandon but learn a lot from OR what’s your favourite learning from a failure.

The holidays have passed and it’s a new year. You probably have a gift card or two and haven’t decided how to use it yet. Allow me to help:

Buy that fancy keyboard you’ve been coveting. Yes, the $100+ model. And get the good mouse/trackball while you’re at it. Just do it.

If you’re reading this, you’re probably a “knowledge worker”, developer, data wrangler, or technical writer. You spend hours every day at your computer, hammering away at the keyboard. Why are you still using that $10 membrane keyboard and $5 corded mouse that the company has a 10-year stockpiles of?

As PASS Summit approaches this week, I’m re-reviewing my evaluations from SQL Saturday Boston and I’d like to give feedback about feedback.

Why Feedback?

Both speakers and event organizers depend upon getting feedback about every session delivered at SQL Saturday, Data Saturday, PASS Summit, or any of the user groups (in-person or virtual). This feedback is valuable to speakers and event organizers alike.

• For speakers, it helps us understand if we’re doing OK when we’re in front of the room, but more importantly we want to know what we can do better.
• For event organizers, it’s helpful in understanding what content attendees want to see. As a former event organizer and user group leader, I’ve even used that feedback to say “hey, we should invite this person to speak at a future meeting.”

Ratings on a scale of 1-5 are okay, but when you’re looking at product reviews on Amazon you aren’t just look at the stars, are you? The written reviews are what matter most when you’re making a decision about garden hoses or cheese graters. This is your opportunity to tell the speaker what works in their presentation and what doesn’t. This is information that can’t be conveyed via 4 stars or an emoji. We need actionable feedback.