Tag Archives: SQL Saturday

PASS Summit, SQLTrain and My First US SQL Saturday

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Next week is the week when I used to dread looking at Twitter and especially the #PASSsummit hashtag, watching all of those folk having a great time in great sessions and doing all of the networking. Last year I was lucky enough to attend for the first time and take part in Chrissy LeMaire and CKs pre-con, this year I decided to add a US SQL Saturday to the list.

I shall be attending SQL Saturday Oregon in Portland and presenting about dbatools. I am really lucky, my amazing Dad, now that he is retired, happily plays Dad’s taxi (still!) and frequently drives me to the airport when I go away on trips. This is the first time he has really gone Wow! When I asked why, it is because Portland is where Grimm is filmed and he has watched the whole series and loved it!

I am looking forward to ticking off another thing on my list of things to do and presenting at a US SQL Saturday to add to 12 SQL Saturday cities in Europe and multiple other events around the world. If you are there come up and say hi.

I shall also be room monitoring for the PowerShell for the DBA session by Amy Herold t | b There are still volunteer slots available to help, sign up here if you are going. It is a lot of fun and an excellent way to give something back. SQL Saturdays take a lot of work to organise and organisers are always willing for some help. You will meet new people and have a lot of fun as well.

To get to Seattle I am going on the SQL Train. A whole bunch of data platform folk travelling on a train together up to Seattle for PASS Summit. It looks like it will be a lot of fun 🙂

Once in Seattle it is time for the week where others will not want to look at my twitter feed 🙂 A whole week at PASS Summit watching the sessions and networking (there may be beer involved) with our peers.

My one piece of advice is please don’t hide away in your hotel room for all of the time that sessions are not on. I know that dealing with a large amount of people can be tough and you might need some me time ( I will ) but there are a lot of activities both loud and quieter where you will have the opportunity to meet up and make new friends and contacts which may really pay back further down the line and you will have fun too.

On the Tuesday I am doing a pre-conference session Professional and Proficient PowerShell: From Writing Scripts to Developing Solutions. A whole day where I will be showing how to write PowerShell modules and all of the tips and tricks that I have learnt over the years.

Wednesday sees me embracing my inner André Kamman – unfortunately he is unable to make PASS Summit this year, so I will be delivering the session dbatools Powershell Library – The Complete Introduction in his place in room 2AB. I shall try to do it in as cool and relaxed a way as he does (It probably wont work I will get too excited 🙂 )

On Thursday I will be talking about dbachecks in room 6C which will also be streamed on PASSTv.

In between all of that, I shall be attending some networking events, visiting sessions, hanging out with people new and old and walking down the corridors, so if you see me, stop me and say hi, I’d love to meet you 🙂
(note – just before my sessions I may be too nervous to properly have a conversation)

Hopefully, I will meet you there and for the twitter folk stuck back in Europe I empathise 🙂

#tsql2sday – Giving Back – Reprise

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Itsql2sdayt’s TSQL Tuesday again! This month our host is Riley Major (b/t) and the subject is Giving Back. He’s given us two options here (as well as the side option of your favorite 2017 improvement). Pick a way that you’d like to give back to the community and talk about it, or if you already give back,  tell us how and why you started.

 

There will be a lot of excellent posts on this subject and one of the things that I like is that you can go to http://tsqltuesday.com and look up all of the entries which means that for a particular topic you can find a bunch of blog posts from different angles (I miss-typed that as angels first and yes they are all angels!) whether it is career improvement or technical like say Extended Events it is all there waiting for you 🙂

I wrote about giving back in 2014 when I was about to help organise SQL Saturday Exeter for the first time. Last year I blogged about a few of the wonderful people who made a difference to me. So this post is a little about how I give back and also hopefully some hints that can help you to do the same as well.

How

There are so many ways that you can give back to the community as Riley’s post shows.

Sharing your knowledge is a good way. I share my knowledge in blog posts and in sessions at user groups and at conferences. You can too.

From beginner, introductory posts and talks to expert level deep dives every single one of us has learned from the blog posts that other people have spent their time and effort creating.

YOU can share your knowledge, even if you have only been using a technology for a few months, you have knowledge of the things you have learned and the things that would have made it easier. Write a post about those things.

Answering questions is another way. You can do this on Stack Overflow, SQL Server Central, PowerShell.Org , Reddit, Facebook , on Twitter using the #sqlhelp or #PowerShellHelp or just in person. I try to answer questions when I see them on twitter or in the SQL Community Slack

Mentoring or just providing feedback to people. You can offer to proof read blog posts or abstract submissions or you can listen to peoples presentations. I do this and it is a lot of fun

I also share my knowledge via my GitHub. All of my presentations slides and code are available as well as other code that I use. I also contribute to open-source projects such as dbatools and dbachecks.  You can do this too. You could open an issue for an improvement or bug. You can contribute your code, even if you are not confident writing the code you can fix spelling mistakes or add documentation., everything helps

You can help with organisation of events. I have helped to organise the PowerShell Europe Conference, PSDay.UK, SQL Saturday Exeter, SQL SouthWest user group, PASS PowerShell Virtual Group. I have also helped with session choices for a number of other events like SQL Grillen and SQLGLA and I have volunteered at many events from SQL Saturdays to SQL Bits. Everything from setting up and tearing down (IE moving heavy things and cleaning up rubbish) to sitting on the information desk, giving out badges, making sure the speakers are on time in their sessions. You can do this too. Just ask the organisers of the events what they need. It is better to do this prior to the event than on the day but I am sure all help is welcomed. Richard Munn and I talked (waffled?) about this at SQL Bits this year

If you would like to be considered as a volunteer for next years SQL Bits please email helpers at sqlbits.com

Why

So why did I start giving back?

I wanted to be useful. I saw the amount of work that Jonathan and Annette were doing organising SQL Saturday Exeter and SQL South West. I hoped that I could help them with that.

Why do I carry on doing it?

Because it is fun 🙂 I enjoy speaking, I enjoy sharing my knowledge and talking to people

That is good but there is more to it as well

You learn so much by writing a presentation or a blog post because you will do research.

You will learn even more when people ask you questions in your sessions or leave comments on your blog posts and you have to go and find the answers

You learn new and useful skills and demonstrate your knowledge to potential employers

My blog is a scrapbook of knowledge that I go back to and use all the time (and sometimes I forget that I have written something and find my own post in the search results!)

But the most important reason is that I feel that it pays back some of the benefit that I have gained from all of those people who’s time and effort I made use of for free when I was learning and continue to do so to this day. All of those blog posts and videos and presentations that I consumed have helped to make me the technician I am today. I have skills and abilities that I would not have without them all and by giving back I hope that I am enabling others to develop and see the benefit of sharing so that they will continue to do so in the future and I can learn from them.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Visual Studio Code Live Sharing Set-Up

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There was an announcement on the Visual Studio Code blog about the public preview of Live Share. This enables you to easily collaborate on code by securely sharing your coding session.

It is remarkably easy to set up 🙂

Installation

Open Visual Studio Code, open the Extensions side bar (CTRL + SHIFT + X)

01 - open extensions

Search for Live Share

02 - search.png

Click Install and then reload when it has done

03 - reload.png

You will notice in the bottom bar it will say finishing the installation and if you open the terminal (CTRL + ‘) and click on Output and change the drop down on the right to Visual Studio Live Share you can see what it is doing

04 - finishing installation.png

It is installing the dependancies as shown below

[Client I] Installing dependencies for Live Share…
[Client I] Downloading package ‘.NET Core Runtime 2.0.5 for win7-x86’
[Client I] Download complete.
[Client I] Downloading package ‘OmniSharp for Windows (.NET 4.6)’
[Client I] Download complete.
[Client I] Installing package ‘.NET Core Runtime 2.0.5 for win7-x86’
[Client V] Extracted packed files
[Client I] Validated extracted files.
[Client I] Moved and validated extracted files.
[Client I] Finished installing.
[Client I] Installing package ‘OmniSharp for Windows (.NET 4.6)’
[Client V] Extracted packed files
[Client I] Validated extracted files.
[Client I] Finished installing.
[Client I] No workspace id found.
Incidentally, this will also show the location of the log file

You will see in the bottom bar it will now say sign in

06 - sign in.png

Clicking that will open a browser and give you a choice of accounts to sign in with, your GitHub or your Microsoft ID

07 - sign in.png

Choose the one that you want to use and do your 2FA.

08 - 2FA.png

You do have 2FA on your Microsoft and GitHub (and all the other services)? If not go and set it up now – here for Microsoft and here for GitHub 

Once you have signed in you will get this notification which you can close

09 - close this notification.png

The icon in the bottom will change and show your account name and if you click it it will open the menu

09 - sharing menu.png

Sharing

To share your session you click on the Share icon in the bottom bar or the Start collaboration session in the menu above. The first time you do this there will be a pop-up as shown

05 - firewall popup.png

You can decide which way you (or your organisation) want to share. I chose to accept the firewall exception.

10 - invite link.png

The invite link is in your clipboard ready to share with your friends and colleagues (other open source contributors ??)

They can either open the link in a browser

11 - join via browser.png

or by using the Join Collaboration Session in the menu in VS Code

12 - Join via VS COde.png

Once they do the sharer will get a notification

13 - notification of sharing.png

and the person who has joined will have the same workspace opened in their Visual Studio Code

14 -shared workspace.png

You can then collaborate on your code and share the session. In the video below the left hand side is running in my jump box in Azure and the right hand side on my laptop and you can see that if you highlight code in one side it is shown in the other and if you alter it in one side it is changed in the other. I also saved that file in the joined session rather than from the session that initialised the sharing and it then saved in both sessions 🙂

So that shows how easy it is to install and to use. You can dive deeper using the documentation.

 

Happy Collaborating 🙂

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.

Presentation Nerves

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My previous post on interviews and a number of conversations this year inspired me to write this post. I am lucky enough to have been selected to speak at numerous events over the past few years and I am really lucky because I thoroughly enjoy doing them. The feedback I receive from those sessions has been wonderful and it seems that in general most people really enjoy them.

This leads to some misconceptions though. Recently people have said to me “Oh I am not like you, I get far to nervous to do a session” and also “I am so glad that you get just as nervous as me before presenting I thought it was just me” even though I have blogged about this before. I think it is important for newer speakers as well as more established ones to know that more presenters than you realise get very nervous before they speak.

Many don’t publicise this (which is fine) but I will. I get nervous before I speak. I know that it doesn’t show when I start my presentation but it is there. My stomach does back flips, my hands shake, I forget to bring things to the room. I worry that I will make a catastrophic mistake or that I’ll open my mouth and nothing will come out.

It’s ok. It doesn’t last very long, it’s gone at the moment I start speaking. Other speakers need a few moments into their session before they stop really feeling those nerves but it goes.

Whenever I am involved in a conversation about nerves and presentations on twitter I respond in the same way

I love this quote by Joan Jett (young people link) To me it means that you should be nervous before speaking because that energy will ensure that you give a good presentation. If you get up to do a presentation and you are blasé or complacent about it this will be obvious to your audience and not in a good way.

So what to do?

Practice

You can’t just approach a presentation knowing that you will be nervous and expect it to be ok. You need to have a background of confidence that your presentation will turn out ok.

You need to practice.

You need to practice your presentation.

You need to practice your presentation out loud.

You need to practice your presentation out loud more than once.

You have to get used to hearing your own voice when presenting. It can be off-putting hearing yourself blathering on and you don’t want that to surprise you or interrupt your flow. This will also help with projecting away from your screen and into the room if you practice correctly. Imagine all the people in the room and try to speak in their direction with your head up and not pointing down at the screen.

You also need to practice your timings, so that you know that your session will fit in the allocated time. Make notes of your timings at certain points in your presentation so that when you are presenting your session you can be aware of whether you are still on your expected time. Some people will speak faster in their actual session than the practice and some slower. As you practice and learn you will understand your own rhythm and cadence and be able to alter it if required. This will help you to build that confidence that your presentation will be ok.

More Practice

You need to practice.

You need to practice your demos.

You need to practice your demos more than once.

Being able to reset your demos and run them through will teach you more skills. Using Pester to make sure your environment is in place correctly will help.

Run your demos with your machine set up as it will be for the presentation. If you need to have PowerPoint, SSMS, Visual Studio, Visual Studio Code and three SQL instances running then practice with them all running. You should do this so that your timings when running your demos are the same as when you actual present your session. This is even more important if you are doing a webinar as that software will require some of your machines resources which may slow your demo down.

Knowing that your demos are consistently repeatable and how long they will take will also help to give you the confidence that your presentation will be ok.

Deal with them

If we accept that you will have nerves and that’s not a bad thing you have to be able to deal with them, to use them to make your presentation rock.

This is a distinctly personal thing and I have no idea what will work for you. You will have to try some things and see if they work or not. Recently I found a new way for myself

Normally I like to be in the room I will be presenting in before I do my session as this gives me something that I can listen to, I can see and feel the layout of the room and also usually prepare my laptop with the correct programmes and run Pester to make sure all is as it should be for my demos. In Portugal I was chatting with someone and missed the start of the session and because of the room layout I did not want to disturb the presenter before me. Slava Oks was giving a presentation which I started to watch and it was so mind-melting I completely forgot that I was presenting in the next time slot! Surprisingly, I had almost no time to be nervous and for this time that was a good thing. The fact that I had already opened my presentation and run my Pester tests also helped.

Some speakers like to be amongst the hustle and bustle of a common area. Some like the peace and quiet of a speaker room or work area. Some put their headphones on. Some go outside. Some pace up and down. Some sit quietly. Many sit in a session in the room. Find the one that works for you.

A few deep breaths

Then just before you are giving your presentation take a few deep breathes, reassure yourself that it’s all good and go and be amazing.

Deep breaths will also be useful if you start to feel nervousness overtaking you during your session. Stop, take a deep breath and carry on.

Incidentally, during a presentation in Exeter at my first SQL Saturday I felt decidedly light-headed and as if I was going to pass out. I had literally forgotten to breathe!

What about…… ?

Don’t forget to leave time for questions at the end. Don’t practice to fill all of the allotted time with your presentation. You will need some time for the audience to ask you questions about your presentations.

Having people ask you questions is a good thing. It means that people are engaged in your presentation and interested in what you have shared. Well done, you have achieved what you set out to do and this is some validation

Repeat the question

Repeating the question that you are asked is recommended best practice for presentations but it has another advantage to you. It allows you a little thinking time to organise your thoughts and calm your nerves if needed.

I don’t know

It’s ok to answer a question with I don’t know. Follow up by asking if anyone in the audience can add some value or say I will research that and find out for you come and give me your contact details afterwards.

Feedback

Some events will provide you with feedback from your attendees. You can also ask your friends or other friendly community members for feedback on your session. Use this to improve. Don’t take all the feedback to heart. Look for trends in the data. Don’t let the poor feedback get you down and don’t let the good feedback go to your head (Remember the complacent quote at the top of this post!)

On a side note, whilst providing a score for feedback is useful, what is more useful is some reasoning behind the score. Remember also that the speaker is a human being with feelings. Be kind whilst being constructive.

Your knowledge

Don’t let worry about nerves prevent us from hearing the great knowledge and experience that you have to share. You wont be alone in feeling nervous and you can help yourself to overcome those nerves and get as much out of speaking as I do.

You will find members of the SQL community wiling to help you if you visit the SQL Community Slack you can ask questions in #presentingorspeaking

 

dbatools at #SQLSatDublin

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This weekend SQL Saturday Dublin occurred. For those that don’t know SQL Saturdays are free conferences with local and international speakers providing great sessions in the Data Platform sphere.

Chrissy LeMaire and I presented our session PowerShell SQL Server: Modern Database Administration with dbatools. You can find slides and code here . We were absolutely delighted to be named Best Speaker which was decided from the attendees average evaluation.

Chrissy also won the Best Lightning talk for her 5 minute (technically 4 minutes and 55 seconds) presentation on dbatools as well 🙂

We thoroughly enjoy giving this presentation and I think it shows in the feedback we received.

Feedback

History

We start with a little history of dbatools, how it started as one megalithic script Start-SQLMigration.ps1 and has evolved into (this number grows so often it is probably wrong by the time you read this) over 240 commands from 60 contributors

Requirements

We explain the requirements. You can see them here on the download page.

The minimum requirements for the Client are

  • PowerShell v3
  • SSMS / SMO 2008 R2

which we hope will cover a significant majority of peoples workstations.

The minimum requirements for the SQL Server are

  • SQL Server 2000
  • No PowerShell for pure SQL commands
  • PowerShell v2 for Windows commands
  • Remote PowerShell enabled for Windows commands

As you can see the SQL server does not even need to have PowerShell installed (unless you want to use the Windows commands). We test our commands thoroughly using a test estate that encompasses all versions of SQL from 2000 through to 2017 and whenever there is a vNext available we will test against that too.

We recommend though that you are using PowerShell v5.1 with SSMS or SMO for SQL 2016 on the client

Installation

We love how easy and simple the installation of dbatools is. As long as you have access to the internet (and permission from your companies security team to install 3rd party tools. Please don’t break your companies policies) you can simply install the module from the PowerShell Gallery using

Install-Module dbatools

If you are not a local administrator on your machine you can use the -Scope parameter

Install-Module dbatools -Scope CurrentUser

Incidentally, if you or your security team have concerns about the quality or trust of the content in the PowerShell Gallery please read this post which explains the steps that are taken when code is uploaded.

If you cannot use the PowerShell Gallery then you can use this line of code to install from GitHub

Invoke-Expression (Invoke-WebRequest https://dbatools.io/in)

There is a video on the download page showing the installation on a Windows 7 machine and also some other methods of installing the module should you need them.

Website

Next we visit the website dbatools.io and look at the front page. We have our regular joke about how Chrissy doesn’t want to present on migrations but I think they are so cool so she makes me perform the commentary on the video. (Don’t tell anyone but it also helps us to get in as many of the 240+ commands in a one hour session as well 😉 ). You can watch the video on the front page. You definitely should as you have never seen migrations performed so easily.

Then we talk about the comments we have received from well respected people from both SQL and PowerShell community members so you can trust that its not just some girl with hair and some bloke with a beard saying that its awesome.

Contributors

Probably my favourite page on the web-site is the team page showing all of the amazing fabulous wonderful people who have given their own time freely to make such a fantastic free tool. If we have contributors in the audience we do try to point them out. One of our aims with dbatools is to enable people to receive the recognition for the hard work that they put in and we do this via the team page, our LinkedIn company page as well as by linking back to the contributors in the help and the web-page for every command. I wish I could name check each one of you.

Thank You each and every one !!

Finding Commands

We then look at the command page and the new improved search page and demonstrate how you can use them to find information about the commands that you need and the challenges in keeping this all maintained during a period of such rapid expansion.

Demo

Then it is time for me to say this phrase. “Strap yourselves in, do up your seatbelts, now we are going to show 240 commands in the next 40 minutes. Are you ready!!”

Of course, I am joking, one of the hardest things about doing a one hour presentation on dbatools is the sheer number of commands that we have that we want to show off. Of course we have already shown some of them in the migration video above but we still have a lot more to show and there are a lot more that we wish we had time to show.

Backup and Restore

We start with a restore of one database and a single backup file using Restore-DbaDatabase showing you the easy to read warning that you get if the database already exists and then how to resolve that warning with the WithReplace switch

Then how to use it to restore an entire instance worth of backups to the latest available time by pointing Restore-DbaDatabase at a folder on a share

Then how to use Get-DbaDatabase to get all of the databases on an instance and pass them to Backup-DbaDatabase to back up an entire instance.

We look at the Backup history of some databases using Get-DbaBackupHistory and Out-GridView and examine detailed information about a backup file using Read-DbaBackupHeader.

We give thanks to Stuart Moore for his amazing work on these and several other backup and restore commands.

SPN’s

After a quick reminder that you can search for commands at the command line using Find-DbaCommand, we talk about SPNs and try to find someone, anyone, who actually likes working with SQL Server and SPNs and resolving the issues!!

Then we show Drew’s SPN commands Get-DbaSpn, Test-DbaSpn, Set-DbaSpn  and Remove-DbaSpn 

Holiday Tasks

We then talk about the things we ensure we run before going on holiday to make sure we leave with a warm fuzzy feeling that everything will be ok until we return :-

  • Get-DbaLastBackup will show the last time the database had any type of backup.
  • Get-DbaLastGoodCheckDb which shows the last time that a database had a successful DBCC CheckDb and how we can gather the information for all the databases on all of your instances in just one line of code
  • Get-DbaDiskSpace which will show the disk information for all of the drives including mount points and whether the disk is in use by SQL

Testing Your Backup Files By Restoring Them

We ask how many people test their backup files every single day and Dublin wins marks for a larger percentage than some other places we have given this talk. We show Test-DbaLastBackup in action so that you can see the files being created because we think it looks cool (and you can see the filenames!) Chrissy has written a great post about how you can set up your own dedicated backup file test server

Free Space

We show how to gather the file space information using Get-DbaDatabaseFreespace and then how you can put that (or the results of any PowerShell command) into a SQL database table using Out-DbaDataTable and Write-DbaDataTable

SQL Community

Next we talk about how we love to take community members blog posts and turn them into dbatools commands.

We start with Jonathan Kehayias’s post about SQL Server Max memory (http://bit.ly/sqlmemcalc) and show Get-DbaMaxMemory , Test-DbaMaxMemory and Set-DbaMaxMemory

Then Paul Randal’s blog post about Pseudo-Simple Mode which inspired  Test-DbaFullRecoveryModel

We talked about getting backup history earlier but now we talk about Get-DbaRestoreHistory a command inspired by Kenneth Fishers blog post to show when a database was restored and which file was used.

Next a command from Thomas LaRock which he gave us for testing linked servers Test-DbaLinkedServerConnection.

Glenn Berrys diagnostic information queries  are available thanks to André Kamman and the commands Invoke-DbaDiagnosticQuery and Export-DbaDiagnosticQuery. The second one will output all of the results to csv files.

Adam Mechanic’s sp_whoisactive is a common tool in SQL DBA’s toolkit and can now be installed using Install-DbaWhoIsActive and run using Invoke-DbaWhoIsActive.

Awesome Contributor Commands

Then we try to fit in as many commands that we can from our fantastic contributors showing how we can do awesome things with just one line of PowerShell code

The awesome Find-DbaStoredProcedure which you can read more about here which in tests searched 37,545 stored procedures on 9 instances in under 9 seconds for a particular string.

Find-DbaOrphanedFile which enables you to identify the files left over from detaching databases.

Don’t know the SQL Admin password for an instance? Reset-SqlAdmin can help you.

It is normally somewhere around here that we finish and even though we have shown 32 commands (and a few more encapsulated in the Start-SqlMigration command) that is less than 15% of the total number of commands in the module!!!

Somehow, we always manage to fit all of that into 60 minutes and have great fun doing it. Thank you to everyone who has come and seen our sessions in Vienna, Utrecht, PASS PowerShell Virtual Group, Hanover, Antwerp and Dublin.

More

So you want to know more about dbatools ? You can click the link and explore the website

You can look at source code on GitHub

You can join us in the SQL Community Slack in the #dbatools channel

You can watch videos on YouTube

You can see a list of all of the presentations and get a lot of the slides and demos

If you want to see the slides and demos from our Dublin presentation you can find them here

Volunteers

Lastly and most importantly of all. SQL Saturdays are run by volunteers so massive thanks to Bob, Carmel, Ben and the rest of the team who ensured that SQL Saturday Dublin went so very smoothly