Tag Archives: community

Surprised and Honoured and Proud

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I have always been extremely proud to be a Cloud and Datacenter Management MVP, and lucky enough to be involved with both the PowerShell community as well as the Data Platform community.

Today, July 1st is the date that many MVPs receive their renewal email to let them know that they have been awarded for another year. There is a lot of F5’ing and frequent checking of emails and “Have you heard yet?” DMs going around.

When I received the news, I was using Azure DevOps to run PowerShell and Terraform to build an Azure SQL Elastic Pool (yes, I will write a blog post about it!). I love technology and within my work, like many people, I work across many different disciplines. Azure, Azure DevOps, SQL Server and Microsoft Data Platform products are the main focus of my time.

I didn’t notice the significance of the information.

I was pleased as punch to be renewed again, proud that what I do is recognised by Microsoft, honoured to spend another year as an MVP. Then my friends pointed out the big news that I had missed.

Photo by pixpoetry on Unsplash

There are two award categories.

I have been awarded for both Cloud and Datacenter Management and Data Platform.

I am beyond words.

Proud, Surprised and Honoured.

Thank you to all of the people who help and support me. You help more than you will ever know.

I am going to go and prop my jaw shut!

A PowerShell Conference In A Book

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A Question

Shortly after the European PowerShell Conference and the PowerShell and Devops 2018 summit in the USA Mike Robbins b | t contacted me with a question.

Interested in writing a chapter in a PowerShell book?
I was intrigued and read on.

A Conference in a Book

There was more to this book than just writing about PowerShell though. Mike was suggesting that a group of wonderful PowerShell experts (Here’s a Twitter list) got together and created a conference in a book.

The book is designed as a conference in a book where each chapter is written independently with content similar to what you would present in a 45 minute presentation.

That’s a neat idea, people who couldn’t come to one of the conferences would be able to get an experience a little bit like attending a conference but in book form.

OK there would be no networking, evening entertainment or instance responses to questions but a bundle of useful information that you can take with you and read anywhere.

It’s All For Charity

(I hope older UK viewers read that in this voice 🙂 )

The bit that clinched it for me was this though

We’re donating all of the royalties from the book to the DevOps Collective Scholarship program https://leanpub.com/causes/devopscollective.

All the money raised by buying this book will go to the DevOps Collective OnRamp Scholarship program.

This scholarship provides

  • ticket to PowerShell and DevOps Global Summit OnRamp track specifically designed for entry-level professionals
  • five nights lodging
  • domestic airfare
  • buddy programme
and half of the slots are reserved for under-represented groups.
I really approve of this idea, without the help and support of the SQL and PowerShell technical communities I would not be where I am today and this will help to bring other people in at an early stage in their career. I am proud that I can give a little back.

Fabulous Editors

So I said yes.

I then had to sit down and write some words. I wrote about how we created dbachecks, the challenges we faced and how we overcame them.

One of my biggest challenges was writing in the wrong English! The book is written in American English and there are zeds where there should be esses and missing u’s in words! My spell checker was covered in red squiggles! The second challenge was getting the code to fit the column limit for the book. I show a lot of the AST code that we use to validate that dbachecks code will work correctly and it doesnt split to 80 characters very easily.

Luckily I had 3 wonderful, patient editors to help me with all of this. Mike Robbins , Michael T Lombardi and Jeff Hicks each helped me to make the chapter read more fluently, make sense and be spelled correctly!

Thank you very much you three for all the work you have put into this book.

Help Yourself and Others

If you want to attend a PowerShell conference in book form, want 30 chapters of fabulous PowerShell material and want to help grow and diversify our industry then look no further you can get the book here

book

 

You can also find all of the authors twitters and websites below, You should go and see what they are sharing there as well.

👍 Thank you to Mike Robbins, Mike Kanakos and Rob Pleau for having all the links below already handy in their blog posts at the time of writing this!
Author Website
Mike F Robbins https://mikefrobbins.com
Jeff Hicks https://jdhitsolutions.com
Michael Lombardi https://appoint.ly/t/michaeltlombardi
Adam Murry https://tikabu.com.au/blog/
Anthony Nocentino http://www.centinosystems.com
Brandon Olin https://devblackops.io
Brian Bunke https://www.brianbunke.com
Don Jones https://donjones.com
Doug Finke https://dfinke.github.io
Emin Atac https://p0w3rsh3ll.wordpress.com
Fred Weinmann https://allthingspowershell.blogspot.com
Graham Beer https://graham-beer.github.io
Irwin Strachan https://pshirwin.wordpress.com
James Petty https://scriptautomaterepeat.com
Jeremy Murrah https://murrahjm.github.io
Justin Sider https://invoke-automation.blog
Luc Dekens http://www.lucd.info
Mark Kraus https://get-powershellblog.blogspot.com
Mark Wragg https://wragg.io
Mike Kanakos https://www.networkadm.in
Mike Shepard https://powershellstation.com
Patrick Gruenauer https://sid-500.com
Prateek Singh https://ridicurious.com
Rob Pleau https://ephos.github.io
Thomas Lee https://tfl09.blogspot.com
Thomas Rayner https://workingsysadmin.com
Thom Schumacher https://powershellposse.com
Tim Curwick https://MadWithPowerShell.com
Tim Warner https://timwarnertech.com
Tommy Maynard https://tommymaynard.com
Tore Groneng https://asaconsultant.blogspot.com
Wesley Kirkland https://wesleyk.me

TSQL2sDay – Folks Who Have Made a Difference

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tsql2sday

This months TSQL2sDay is an absolute brilliant one hosted by Ewald Cress

the opportunity to give a shout-out to people (well-known or otherwise) who have made a meaningful contribution to your life in the world of data.

Fabulous, fabulous idea Ewald, I heartily approve

Now this is going to be difficult. There are so many wonderful people in the #SQLFamily who are so gracious and generous and willing to share. I am also lucky enough to be part of the PowerShell community which is also equally filled with amazing people. I do not want to write a novel or a massive list of people, I don’t want to risk missing someone out (Ewald, I’m beginning to question whether ‘fabulous’ should become ‘tricky and challenging’ !!)

So after consideration I am only going to talk about 4 wonderful people and the effect they have had on my life, my career and my community involvement but know that I truly appreciate the input that all of the peoples have had and the amazing friendships that I have all over the world. There is no order to this list, these are 4 of the people in equal first with all the other people I haven’t mentioned. This post should really scroll sideways. Interestingly I noticed after writing this that they are in reverse chronological order in my life!

The Hair!

At PASS Summit this year many people came up to me and said “Hey, Beard ……..” The first person who called me that is an amazing inspiring bundle of talented energy called Chrissy LeMaire

Many moons ago, we exchanged messages over social media and email, chatted after a PowerShell Virtual Group presentation and then one day she asked me to join as an organiser for the Virtual Group.

When dbatools was in it’s infancy she asked me to help and since then has given me interesting challenges to overcome from introducing Pester and appveyor to the dbatools development process to creating continuous delivery to our private PowerShell gallery for our summit pre-con forcing me to learn and implement new and cool things. Our shared love of enabling people to do cool things with PowerShell is so much fun to do 🙂

She is so generous and giving of her time and knowledge and has an amazing capability to get things done, whether by herself or by encouraging and supporting others.

We have presented at many conferences together, both SQL and PowerShell and we have the best of times doing so. It is so refreshing to find someone that I am comfortable presenting with and who has the same passion and energy for inspiring people. (It’s also fun to occasionally throw her off her stride mid-presentation (Thank you Cathrine 🙂 )

I am proud to call her my buddy. You are so inspiring Chrissy.

Thank you Ma’am

Amazing Couple

A few months after becoming a DBA I was the only DBA at the company as the others all left for various reasons. I was drowning in work, had no idea what I should be doing. I knew I didn’t have the knowledge and during that time I began to be aware of the SQL community and all the fine resources that it provides.

I then found out about a local user group and emailed the leader Jonathan Allen (He surprised me by reminding of this during our pre-con in Singapore a couple of weeks ago!) Jonathan and his wife Annette run the SQL South West user group and are also members of the SQL Bits committee, Annette is also the regional mentor for the UK. They give an awful amount of time and effort to the SQL Community in the UK. It took a few months before I even had the time to attend a user group and in those early days they both answered my naive questions and passed on so much of their technical knowledge and methodology to me and I soaked it up.

Later on, they invited me to help them to organise SQL Saturday Exeter, encouraged me to speak, gave me fabulous feedback and pointers to improve, encouraged me to volunteer for SQL Bits and have been incredibly supportive. I love them both very much. Neither like having their photo taken so I can’t embarrass them too much.

Next time you see them give them a hug.

Thank you J and A

The First One

Andrew Pruski dbafromthecold and SQL Containers Man

At the time I am talking about he was not a member of the SQL Community although he possessed all of the qualities that describe such a person. Now he is an established blogger and speaker and attender of SQL events.

He is one of the DBA’s who left me on my own!! He is the first SQL DBA I ever worked with. The person who taught me all those important first bits of knowledge about being a SQL DBA. He imparted a great amount of knowledge in a few months with great patience to an eager newbie.

More than that, he showed me that to succeed in IT, you need to do more than just an everyday 9-5, that it requires more time than that. He instilled in me (without realising it) a work ethic and a thirst for doing things right and gaining knowledge that I still have today. He inspired me when I was faced with trying to understand the mountain of knowledge that is SQL Server that it was possible to learn enough. He taught me the importance of testing things, of understanding the impact of the change that is being made. He showed me how to respond in crises and yet was still willing to share and teach during those times.

He has had a greater impact on me than he will ever know and I have told him this privately many times. I will never forgive him for abandoning me all those years ago and yet that is a large part of what made me who I am today. I was forced to have to deal with looking after a large estate by myself and needed to learn to automate fast and he just about left me with the skills to be able to accomplish that.

Massive shout out to you fella. Thank you

All the Others

Seriously, there are so many other people who I wish I could thank.

Every single one of you who blogs or speaks or records webinars that I have watched – thank you.

All of the organisers who ensure that events happen – thank you

All of the volunteers who assist at those events – thank you.

That group of amazing European speakers at the first SQL Saturday Exeter I attended. The cool group, my wife still reminds me of how I came home from that event so inspired by them. How incredibly generous and welcoming they were and how they welcomed me into their group even though I didn’t feel worthy to share their table. They taught me about the lack of egos and humbleness that defines the SQL family. I am proud to call them my friends now. Thank You (You know who you are)

We have a great community, may its ethos continue for a long time.

A Pretty PowerBi Pester Results Template File

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I have left the heat and humidity of Singapore where I have been presenting at the PowerShell Conference Asia and DevOpsDays Singapore to travel to Seattle for PASS Summit. During my Green is Good – Red is Bad session someone asked me if the PowerBi that I showed at the end would work with any Pester Test Results object and I said (without thinking) that it would.

It turns out that the PowerBi that I had set up for that session will work with my function to run Pester Tests against an Ola Hallengren installation but some of the formatting and custom columns were specific to that test.

I said that I would share a Power Bi file that people could plug any Pester Test Results into. This is the first iteration of that. I doubt that it will work for every single test but I think it will be a good starting point for people to use.

This is how to use it

Download the file from here.

Run your Pester Tests using the PassThru Parameter and set the results to a variable, you can also use the Show Parameter to reduce the output of the tests to the screen (and also speed up the tests)

$PesterResults = Invoke-Pester -Script  C:\temp\PBI-Test01.ps1 -Show Summary -PassThru

Then we convert the $PesterResults object into a JSON file

$PesterResults.TestResult | ConvertTo-Json -Depth 5 | Out-File C:\temp\pbi-test.json

Open the Power Bi file you downloaded

Click Home

then the words “Edit Queries”

then data source settings,

highlight the filename and click change source

then navigate to the JSON file you just created, click ok and close and the apply changes.

Which will load the data from the JSON file and display your pester results. You can then save this file with a new name and keep the template for other tests.

It’s not going to be perfect

It’s not going to work in all circumstances and I expect that with some test results it will display the results in a less than optimal manner but you should be able to modify this to suit your needs.

Please give it a try and see how you get on

Here is a sample report created with Demo 1 from my Green is Good session

You can click around and change the data you can see and also look at the other 4 pages

Here is another one that I created using my dbatools-scripts repo and a config file. Again, have a click around and see what it does.

$Config = (Get-Content GIT:\dbatools-scripts\TestConfig.json) -join "`n" | ConvertFrom-Json
$PesterResults = Invoke-Pester .\dbatools-scripts\ -PassThru
$PesterResults.TestResult | Convertto-Json |Out-File C:\temp\dbatools-scripts-pester.json

 

I also created a quick video showing the process too which I will upload when I am not at 35000 feet!!

Enjoy 🙂 Also, let me know if you think it would be better to have the file in Github which would allow contributions but it would only be seen as a binary file and therefore merging will be difficult. I am happy to do so.

Announcing PSDay.UK – Whats a PSDay?

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On Thursday evening I attended the joint London WinOps and PowerShell User Group. It was an excellent evening with two great sessions by Jaap Brasser and Filip Verloy.

PSDay.UK

There was also an exciting announcement about PSDay.UK  https://psday.uk

PSDay.UK is a one day PowerShell event providing the opportunity for you to spend a whole day learning PowerShell from renowned experts from the UK and international speaking community. It will be held at

Skills Matter | CodeNode, 10 South Place, London, EC2M 7EB, GB

on

Friday 22nd September 2017  .ics

We will be running two tracks

  • PowerShell Zero to Hero
  • DevOps with PowerShell

Register your interest

Please go and visit the website and have a look and register your interest to get further notifications about the event.

Follow the @PSDayUK twitter account and Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/PSDayUK/ and keep yourself informed on this fantastic new event.

Want to Speak at PSDay.UK ?

We already have some fantastic speakers lined up but we would like to invite people to send us submissions for more sessions. If you have a PowerShell talk that will fit into one of the tracks and experience of delivering sessions at events please send us submissions via the website.
If you have questions about speaking feel free to contact me via twitter at @sqldbawithbeard

What is a PSDay ?

The International PowerShell community has three main global events which run over a number of days with top notch international speakers and Microsoft PowerShell team members, delivering in-depth information about the latest PowerShell trends and technologies, and connecting national communities with another.

There are a number of other PowerShell events that have been organised by wonderful volunteers in numerous countries and we feel there is an opportunity to create national events which complement the global events and help PowerShell passionates and professionals to get in touch and learn from another with a similar branding of PSDay.

We foresee PSDays to be smaller one day national events promoting speakers from the host country supported by other international speakers with the aim of increasing the exposure of national PowerShell user groups as well as providing excellent PowerShell training.

There will be a board of PowerShell community folk set up who will approve requests to use the PSDay name and shield logo providing the event is professionally organized and offer help with technical questions, viral marketing, and experience. We hope that this will enable people to set up their own PSDay in their own country and increase the exposure of the PowerShell community as well as PowerShell knowledge whilst sharing resources, knowledge, experience and skills and ensuring a good standard of PowerShell community national events.

Further details of this will be forthcoming and we welcome offers of assistance from people with relevant experience