2020-06-02T17:53:51+00:00
Quickly install Git Town using bash in Ubuntu container with the following:
2020-05-29T22:16:02+00:00
Iterm2 is just beautiful. What a fantastic tool with so many usability features.
2020-05-19T17:27:31+00:00
Migrating from Windows 10 to macOS for professional use this week. So far the most painful things have been:
- Pretty rough experience getting displaylink to work, definitely not as plug-and-play as Windows.
- Shortcuts! I’m a serious shortcut fanatic. The difference in control/command/alt usage on on a mac is painful to my muscle memory and coding flow. Trying to not remap to windows based keys, but it’s been hard.
- Window management. I’ve used divvy and tried some other’s, …
2020-05-17T16:32:48+00:00
Digging the guitar tone in this. Need to break out my Line6 Helix now. 🎸
2020-05-15T16:09:22+00:00
✔ Animated a fuzzy tickle creature.
✔ Rescue a bird stuck in a vent
✔ Begin DevOps yaking shaving session
2020-05-13T03:36:28+00:00
Jedi: Fallen Order has the most linear gameplay I’ve done in a while. View map, get object, run for 15 mins to get back to beginning of map. Rinse and repeat. Feels like I’m back to Skyrim and endless walking. I think Dying Light ruined me with it’s parkour and movement dynamics that made everything feel so immersive.
2020-05-07T22:54:34+00:00
Kept getting an error Incorrect syntax near the keyword 'read' when running the some updated PowerShell 7 in lambda with the dotnet3.1 sdk. Was troubleshooting loading types thinking I was having path issues.
Turns out one of these things is not like the other. 🤣
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I think this explains why “error during “read”. Maybe I should have run in …
2020-05-07T04:19:31+00:00
GitHub Codespaces was announced today. I’ve been a believer in this for a while now, and have been on the early access testing of online.visualstudio.com. Apparently it’s renamed to Visual Studio Codespaces now, and is the same tech. Will be a while before this trickles out to be mainstream, but as an early adopter of “developer workspaces as code” it’s an exciting time.
The fact that I can now spin up with a couple text files a full development test environment, …
2020-05-05T20:12:01+00:00
Finally got atomic algolia to work in CICD for my hugo blog. I’ve tried tackling this in many ways over time, but this finally just worked with plug and play ease thanks to just adding a line to the hugo build netlify.toml file.
If you want to try this out, assuming you’ve already got an algolia index, json file generated and all… then just:
- Setup env variables in netlify build
- Add the following line to your netlify production build script
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2020-05-05T17:33:00+00:00
If you want to simplify keeping up with github releases instead of using email, try the GitHub slack app. Simple create a releases channel and then run these two steps:
/github subscribe terraform-providers/terraform-provider-terraform/github unsubscribe terraform-providers/terraform-provider-terraform issues, deployments, statuses, public, commits,pulls
This should result in a final message saying:
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2020-04-30T05:26:32+00:00
Got some use out of the new beta plugins for netlify.
I added a link checker task and it ran over 2000 internal tests to ensure all internal resources such as images, internal links, and even css assests all correctly were found. 🧹
That’s a great idea for static sites. Incremental maintenance always is better than trying to catch up after years of no upkeep.
Using Pester to Improve Operational Tasks
Taking the Time To Test
Requirements in a constant state of change set you up for failure.
Failure to work through requirements before starting can also increase the risk of failure.
Planning with defined acceptance criteria of work you are committing to is not about filling in more documentation and work that no one cares about. Properly defining the acceptance criteria for yourself is about the exploratory process that defines and limits the scope of the work to deliver the minimum viable …
Improved Windows Terminal Setup
I’ve long been a Cmder/ConEmu user for Windows as it’s provided a much-needed improvement of the standard Windows terminal.
I’ve started trying to use the newer Windows Terminal project to benefit from the improved performance and support, and found getting it up and running with any customizations was a little time consuming and confusing. This wasn’t something I’d hand off to someone who wasn’t looking for experimentation.
So here it goes! Rather than …
A Smattering of Thoughts About Applying Site Reliability Engineering principles
What’s This about
I figured I’d go ahead and take this article which I’ve gutted several times and share some thoughts, even if it’s not an authority on the topic. 😀
In the last year, I’ve been interested in exploring the DevOps philosophy as it applies to operations as well as software development. I originally started various drafts on these concepts back before April 2019, but never got around to finishing it until now.
This isn’t a very focused post, …
Quickly Create Github Release via Cli
Intro
I’ve been trying to improve modularization with Terraform. Using Terraform Cloud, you get a private module repository. The modules are linked to tags in git.
I’ve wanted additionally to specifically create releases for the versions in addition to the tags, to make tracking of usable versions a little cleaner.
There are several ways to do this, including using the GitHub API, npm modules, and more. I wanted a simple CLI tool to do this and ran across this great Go utility …
Asciidoc Distributed Docs as Code
The Problem
- I want to keep my code and my documentation in the same place.
- I want to separate the presentation layer from my documentation content.
- I want to be flexible to publish documentation to a variety of endpoints and formats as processes evolve, without my content being impacted.
- I want to write a solid runbook for things that can’t be fully automated, but still include scripts and other code in their native format.
Documentation is such an important part of a …
Running SQL Server in Docker
I’ve had lots of challenges in getting docker for sql-server working because I’ve wanted to ensure for my dev use case that there was no need for virtual volume management and copying files into and out of this. Instead, I’ve wanted to bind to local windows paths and have it drop all the mdf/ldf right …
2019
Getting Started With Python For Data Exploration
Intro
To get started with running python queries with SQL Server is actually pretty easy. I waited far too long to tackle this, thinking it was much harder than it turned out to be. Hopefully, this can be a good starting point for you as well.
Why would I want to do this?
When you use great tools like dbatools with PowerShell, you come to think that PowerShell is a first class citizen for working with SQL Server. This is true in regards to administration and general usage. However, data …
Improving the Quality of Your Automation Logging with Cowsay
Automation Taxes Your Sanity
You have to glue together systems with your amazing duct taped scripts.
You see failure after failure.
You want help predicting the success of your next run, so I’m going to provide you with an advanced artificially intelligent way to do this through the power of npm install.
NPM
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Getting Started With Terraform
- Added comments about brand new Terraform users ignoring Terraform Cloud for first time tests.
- Added comment about pulling credentials using data source instead of environment variables for AWS as a more advanced option to consider in the future.
- Replaced details on creating terraform credential file with the new
tf login …
2019-09-26T14:10:42+00:00
You know you are a dad when you start looking at a minivan as a really cool vehicle and marvel at all the features that have zilch to do with driving. $35-40k for a glorified station wagon with sliding doors would probably make sane humans question reality, while #dadlife looks at sliding doors as less risk for door ding claims from his little rascals.
You know you have a researching mentality when you begin to investigate minivan prejudices impact in the market against widerspread adoption. …
2019-09-26T14:04:40+00:00
I have a new term for the wait my daughter eats food. Instead of please stop wearing food all over your face and eat proper I’m going to label her: “An experiential tactile food lover”
2019-09-26T13:58:58+00:00
You know you probably reserved the wrong hotel when you drive around from the back and think it’s a condemned building, only to come around the front and realize that’s actually your reservation. Needless to say, that reservation got cancelled.
Painless Synchronization of Azure Blob Storage with AWS S3
Synchronization
Moving data between two cloud providers can be painful, and require more provider scripting if doing api calls. For this, you can benefit from a tool that abstracts the calls into a seamless synchronization tool.
I’ve used RClone before when needing to deduplicate several terabytes of data in my own Google Drive, so I figured I’d see if it could help me sync up 25GB of json files from Azure to S3.
Very happy to report it worked perfectly, and with only a couple …
AWS SSM PowerShell Script Automation
SSM Overview
I’ve found that working with a large number of environments in AWS can provide some interesting challenges for performing various tasks, in a way that scale.
When you begin to have dozens to hundreds of servers that you might need to provide a quick fix, the last thing you want to do is RDP into each and perform some type of scripted action.
AWS SSM (Systems Manager) provides a tremendous amount of functionality to help manage systems. It can perform tasks from running a …
Bump nuspec file version with powershell
Bump Nuspec Version
Bumping the version of the nuspec file requires a little tweaking and I got some help from the slack powershell community to ensure I handled the xml parsing correctly. This was the result. If you are running a chocolatey package build or equivalent nuspec build via an agent and want a way to ensure the latest build updates the build version incrementally this should help.
This snippet should help give you a way to bump a nuspec file version programmatically.
I modified …
Leverage AWS System Manager Sessions
Use Case
Leveraging aws system manager sessions can help with aws development, by eliminating the need to RDP for work that can be done via a PowerShell session. In addition, it can help bypass the need to use SSH tunneling, remote Windows management, or RDP hops into the final destination.
This leverages IAM Credentials, allowing consistent security management in alignment with other IAM policies, instead of having to manage another security setting like remote management would require, …
2019-05-31T19:00:42.000+00:00
I’d read about Terraform 0.12 and thought it was much further out, so moved on with regret from evaluating the massive number of improvements. Just found out it was released, and choco upgrade terraform -y provided me with a delightful 0.12 upgrade. If you haven’t explored it yet, go do it!
Things like loops, no longer having to reference any variable with string interpolation, and more promises to make this a big productivity improvement for those enjoying Terraform.
If you …
2019-05-17T15:59:50-05:00
Kids learn so quick. It’s amazing how fast my son has picked up #origami. He often has to wait for his slow-poke dad.
2019-05-17T15:57:32-05:00
Really enjoying my experience with Terraform from the last month. If you have any resources in the cloud you have to deploy and you are having to do them manually, you should take a look. It’s very easy to get going with the basics and the time it can save as you build up Terrachops (patent pending) can be tremendous.
2019-05-16T11:15:28-05:00
Downloading a Visual Studio Code vsix extension and then installing manually in Azure Data Studio works for some extensions! For instance, downloading Simple Alignment from the marketplace, and then running in Azure Data Studio successfully installed the utility.
You can also many of your keyboard settings straight from vscode into Azure Data Studio so you don’t have to remap all those keys. The beauty of json configuration files 😄
2019-04-25 00:39:35 -0500
Finally upgraded my graphics card and hardrive. EVGA RTX 2080 and a Samsung Evo 970 NVMe 2TB SSD breathed new life into my PC. Running 100hz 3440x1440 ultrawide on a 10 year old AMD 6950 was just not doing the trick.
2019-04-19 22:57:00 -0500
Working smart: how great performers do less work
This book so far is a good read. I like the concept of the “feedback loop”, and doing small iterative improvements with a targeted narrow focus to improve each day. It’s very much in alignment with Agile concepts. It’s kinda like delivery of small measurable bits of value for your own improvement. This contrasts our typical promise to ourselves of radical transformation or resolutions that never get realized. Clarifying …
2019-04-18T10:23:31-06:00
This infernal keyboard lag is killing me. I’m guessing it’s due to some OS corruption as my disk is going bad and bad sector warnings keep increasing. Blah! 😬
2019-04-17T10:23:53-06:00
Today I learned how to create a microblog / microblogs section in my hugo layout by frakensteining together some styling tweaks to part of jnjosh.com hugo theme. 🌮
Debugging Type Binding in PowerShell
Some effort I spent in researching Type Binding in Stack Overflow to help answer a question by Chris Oldwood helped me solidify my understanding of the best way to debug more complicated scenarios such as this in PowerShell.
Spent some digging into this and this is what I’ve observed.
First for clarity I do not believe that you should consider the …
Migrating From Hipchat To Slack
Last Minute Migration?
If you are about to perform a last minute migration here’s a couple tips as you jump ship from Hipchat and move to Slack. Hipchat is sunsetting I believe on Feb 15th, so I figured I’d share what I do have in case it’s helpful, as it won’t stay tremendously relevant for long.
Problem: Hipchat access will be removed and you need more time
Export the hipchat content to a file and upload to your own s3 bucket. That will ensure you have some time …
SQL Server Database Experimentation Assistant - How to Run a Capture
DEA
Very basic look at the setup as I couldn’t find much documentation on this when I last tried this out in 2018. Maybe it will help you get started a little more quickly. I’ve not had a chance to leverage the actual comparisons across a large workload. When I originally wrote up the basics on this last year I found my needs required more customized load testing approaches.
Adding The Feature
Added the DRCReplay.exe and the controller services by pulling up the feature setup …
2018
Dedupe Google Drive with RClone
An issue with duplicates
I migrated from Amazon Cloud Drive to a paid Google Drive account. To facilate this move, I used a paid service called MultCloud. For me, Comcast prevents unlimited data, so it would have been challenging to manage 1.5TB of video and photography files movement by downloading then reuploading to Google Drive.
I ran into issues due to hitting rate limiting with Multcloud. As a result, I had to work through their awkard user interface to relaunch those jobs, which still …
NTFS Compression and SQL Server Do Not Play Well Together
Wanted to be proactive and move a database that was in the default path on C:\ to a secondary drive as it was growing pretty heavily.
What I didn’t realize was the adventure that would ensure.
Lesson 1
Don’t move a SQL Server database to a volume that someone has set NTFS Compression on at the drive level.
Lesson 2
Copy the database next time, instead of moving. Would have eased my anxious dba mind since I didn’t have a backup. before you judge me.. it was a dev …
Deleting a Directory That Has a Trailing Space Shouldn't Be This Hard
It shouldn’t be this hard. This is a consumate #windowsmoment
If you occasionally use something like Robocopy, or other command line tool, it can be possible to create a directory with a trailing slash. For instance
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This trailing space would be actually used by Robocopy to initialize a directory that has a trailing space in the name. This …
SQL .NET Requirements
SQL Server Install Requirements
SQL Server Installation requirements indicate .NET 3.5, 4.0, or 4.6 depending on the version. This is not including SSMS. At this point you shouldn’t use SSMS from any SQL ISO. Just install SQL Management Studio directly.
See for more details on this
From a quick review here’s what you have regarding .NET requirements for the database engine.
| SQL Version | .NET Required |
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| >= SQL 2016 RC1 (SQL … |
Git Cracking
Git Some Pain
Having come from a Team Foundation Server background, I found Git to be a bit confusing. The problem is primarily the big difference in a distributed version control system vs non-distributed. In addition to that complexity the terminology is not exactly intuitive. …
Migration To Jekyll
I’ve been in the process of migrating my site to it’s final home (as far as my inner geek can be satisfied staying with one platform)… Jekyll.
Jekyll
Jekyll is a static website generator that takes plain markdown files and runs through through files that are basically templates for the end html content, allowing flexibility in content generation. The result ends up being a static website with beautifully generated typography, search, pagination, and other great features …
2017
Time With Family - Thanksgiving
I’ve made it my personal quest as a creative who has a passion for videography to try and capture simple moments during my life with family. There are plenty of epic indie films, and I can’t commit this type of time with a day job, family, and other interests. I think this is a good start. Thanks to Robert & Steph for their hospitality and making this a special thanksgiving. Was a wonderful time with family
Delight in the Little Moments
This last Easter I had some fun with the kids at their grandparents. Remember the days of spinning until you were nauseous? Was fun to watch the kids enjoying this so I took a few clips, nothing fancy, just a snapshot of enjoying the little moments in life.
Thinking I’ll try this approach for a while. Small 2 minute videos that aren’t refined a lot are easy for me to produce. I typically only do a couple a year because I tend to work on them extensively, but maybe just like blogging, …
Welcome to the World Little Ella
Proud to announce Ella the newest addition to my family joined us today @ 6:19pm, weighing in at 6lbs and 11 ounces. Yes, that’s 6lbs of cuteness. :-) I’m incredibly blessed to have this third addition to my family, and look forward to treasuring every moment with her. God sure knows how to give an amazing gift!
It was a rough 24 hours resulting in our first cesarean experience. This was a bit intense, but Sarah pulled through as a trooper, and we are now finished with post-operation …
Recovery is a Marathon, Not a Sprint - Hurricane Harvey
It’s important to remember that the road to recovery is not an instant process. Right now we have a ton of volunteers and people working to help those in need. I’m reminding myself, as much as any readers here, the process to recovery for people most impacted is not a single week of effort event. In some cases, entire homes were lost and without flood insurance, the financial devastation can be profound.
A Waterlogged Texan Reporting In from Northpoint Tomball
Waterlogged
What a crazy weekend. Choose to evacuate the family as water was slowly creeping up closer to the house. I was ready today when I made it back to the house to see the water in the house, but to my astonishment it was only half-way up the driveway. Turning down the road 1 house away, many houses did not fare so well, and water looks to have made it in many homes.
A Not-So Waterlogged Texan - Tuesday
Better than expected, we are looking to be back in our house Thursday. Apparently some SUV’s are just starting to gain access. Don’t want to risk it so giving it a little extra time. That’s much better than I expected at beginning of this whole situation!
Relief efforts …
Ultrawide Monitor - Samsung CF971 - First impressions
As a developer, I’ve been a big fan of multiple monitors for a long time. I moved to a triple screen setup years ago, and up until recently, had no desire to try anything different.
Well… I’ve finally found the replacement. The holy grail of productivity, immersion, as well as usability. Ultrawides :-)
Don’t you miss the extra screen?
No. The width of the screen is plenty for 2 full Visual Studio environments, or 3 text editors side by side. I’ve always had …
Fixing VirtualBox Only Showing 32bit Windows OS Options
Original help was identified from this article Why is VirtualBox only showing 32 bit guest versions on my 64 bit host OS?
In browsing through the comments, I saw mention that the root issue is that Hypervisor running interferes with Virtualboxes virtual management, so I disabled Hypervisor service, repaired the install, and rebooted. I also disabled automatic start for Hypervisor. This resolved the issue without requiring the uninstallation of the Hypervisor feature in Windows.
Exploring SQL Server With Powershell And SMO Basics
SqlServer Powershell Cmdlets 2017 - Initialize Look
Diving into the Sql Server Management Objects library can be a pretty interesting process. You get to work with database objects as in a new way, and begin manipulating and execute code in a much different approach than purely using T-SQL. Powershell offers a unique way to interact with prebuilt cmdlets, and you can explore leveraging .NET in powershell as well to have a powerful toolkit of options. This post is a not focused on a full …
Capturing Perfmon Counters With Telegraf
Setting up Telegraf to Capture Metrics
I had a lot of issues with getting the GO enviroment setup in windows, this time and previous times. For using telegraf, I’d honestly recommend just leveraging the compiled binary provided.
Once downloaded, generate a new config file by running the first command and then the next to install as service. (I tried doing through NSSM originally and it failed to work with telegraf fyi)
Once this service was setup and credentials entered, it’s …
InfluxDB and Annotations
This post assumes you’ve already setup InfluxDB and have Grafana running.
Inserting annotations
Annotations are not a special type of resource, instead it’s just another metric that you query with a feature in Grafana to display on other metrics. This means the same …
Dataedo - First Look
Image links broken. Since their product is continually improving, I’m going to just link to their product here instead so you can review their latest demo content there. Dataedo.
Overall, I’ve enjoyed the product and think it has been improved over time. There are SQL scripts for bulk updating certain values on …
Spotify vs Google Play
I’ve recently switched over to Spotify for the nth time to explore the Spotiverse world and compare as a long time Google Play Music user. This is a big deal for me, as I was a first adopter of Google Play and have used it before All Access, and subscribed immediately to All Access once it was released. As a ravenous music consumer, I’ve preferred the subscription model for instant, on demand access. This is my personal comparison of some of the strengths and weaknesses of each, …
ANTS Performance Profiler for the SQL Server Dev
There are a few .NET tools that until recently I haven’t had the chance to work with as much, specifically ANTS Memory Profiler and ANTS Performance Profiler. The memory profiler is more useful for someone focused on memory leaks which a SQL Dev …
Update SSMS With PS1
Use Chocolatey. This page keeps changing it’s structure, so the regex to parse for Ketarin and this PS1 script keep breaking. Updated to latest version as of 2018-03-29, but recommend checking out the Chocolately Package created for SSMS for this by flcdrg as chocolately is a much nicer way to keep up to date and …
External Tool VSCODE called from SQL Management Studio
Previous Related Post: Split personality text editing in SSMS with Sublime Text 3
In this prior post I wrote about how to call Sublime Text 3 from SSMS to allow improved text manipulation to be quickly called from an active query window in SQL Management Studio. Vscode is a newer editor from Microsoft, and the argument calls took a little work to get working. Here is what I found for having your SQL file open in vscode via call from SSMS (I imagine also works in Visual Studio 2017 this way as …
Best Practices: Defining Explicit Length for Varchar/Nvarchar
SA0080 : Do not use VARCHAR or NVARCHAR data types without specifying length. Level: Warning
When using varchar/nvarchar it should be explicitly defined. This can be a very nasty bug to track down as often nothing will be thrown if not checked in an application. Instead, ensure your script explicitly defines the smallest length that fits your requirements. The reason I rate this as a very dangerous practice, is that no error is thrown. Instead, the results being returned will be shorter than …
Add User To Admin Group on Machine
In setting up some build machines for development, it’s tedious to go and add several users to the admin group. Here’s a snippet to expedite that task and help you setup more quickly.
Powershell Module Improvements for SQL Server in 2017
simple setup
A major improvement that seems to have quietly slipped into the sql developers world is an improved SQLServer powershell module. The improved module …
Running InfluxDB as a service in Windows
Run as a Service
As part of the process to setup some metrics collections for sql-server based on perfmon counters I’ve been utilizing InfluxDB. Part of getting started on this is ensuring InfluxDB runs as a service instead of requiring me to launch the exe manually. For more information on InfluxDb, see my other post: Setting Up InfluxDb, Chronograf, and Grafana for the SqlServer Dev
This of course, did not go without it’s share of investigation since I’m working with a …
Setting Up InfluxDb, Chronograf, and Grafana for the SqlServer Dev
There are some beautiful ways to visualize time series data with the tools I’m going to go over. This post is purely focused on the initial setup and saving you some time there. In a future post, I’ll show how some of these tools can help you visualize your server …
Automate Windows Updates for Development
I’ve run into the case where I wanted updates continually applied, while the machine still was part of the GPO that didn’t automatically install updates. For this developer and test oriented machine I wanted every update applied.
I utilized a great module for this and created a script to setup the task and logging to make this an easy task.
If you experience an issue with the WindowsUpdate Vs Microsoft update as the configured update provider, then you can just change the switch in …
Programming Fonts For The Newb
the camps
Once you get into coding fonts, you’ll find that there are two primary camps.
- Don’t give a crap about it. “I’ll use defaults for everything and probably wouldn’t care if I was coding in Arial”. If this is you, then this post is definitely not for you. Please continue to enjoy Comic Sans with my pity. :-)
- Font aficionados “Your world will change forever once you use this specific font! It will increase your productivity 300%”
Inside …
TFS Custom Task - Service Actions (for TFS 2015 Update 2.1 or before)
Apparently, boolean values for custom VSTS tasks for versions prior to TFS 2015 Update 3) require some special handling as they don’t pass the checkbox values as actual powershell $true or $false. Instead the task passes this information along as true or false. To properly handle …
Red Gate SQL Clone (1) - Initial Setup
Note this was during earlier beta usage, so some of the UI and other features will have been updated more. I plan on writing more on this promising tool as I get a chance to dive into it more, especially the powershell cmdlets for database cloning automation. In the meantime, I believe the permissions issue is still relevant, so I’ll post this as a reminder in case someone is working through the initial setup.
It seems like a real promising toolkit for testing and reducing storage …
Life Hack: When you need a mouse pad
My Logitech Master mouse went on the fritz… Requiring me to use my trusty Microsoft mouse. This is an optical based mouse based mouse that started driving me insane with the lack of precision. This exhibited random skips and overall lack of agreeability. I ran across some posts mentioning optical mice have issues with certain surfaces making it hard to detect precise movements and suggested using a surface with a pattern or irregularity, even a piece of paper being scribbled on. I was …
Track Creation of Databases
Sys.Databases has some create information, but I was looking for a way to track aging, last access, and if databases got dropped. In a development environment, I was hoping this might help me gauge which development databases were actually being used or not.
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SSMS 2016 - Object Explorer Read Uncommitted
I ran through some directions from others, including the very helpful post from SqlVariant, but I had issues locating the correct keys. For my Windows 10 machine, running SSMS 2016, I found the registry keys related to the object explorer located in a different path.
I found matches for read committed/uncommitted string at: HKCU\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\VisualStudio\14.0\SSDT\SQLEditorUserSettings
Running the following powershell command:
get-itemproperty -path …
Redgate SQL Data Compare & Devart DBForge Data Compare
I’m a big fan of Redgate, as I’m in the Friend of Redgate program. However, I do also utilize some other toolkits. One competitor that I find has some , but I do dabble with some other toolkits (I know heresy :-) . One of the competitors that I find has some brilliant features, but many time lacks the refinement and ease of use of Redgate is Devart tools. The tools they offer are often really nice, and continually updated based on feedback. As a general rule, I’d say the Devart …
Quick Way to Run Powershell Tasks in Parallel
Running tasks in parallel can be a bit difficult in powershell. However, there are a few projects out there that optimize the performance and provide a better experience of running tasks in parallel with less effort.#cool uses A few cool uses of this might be running parallel sql queries across multiple servers or databases while maintaining a throttled limit to avoid saturation of the target environment. Additionally, long running queries might benefit in running in parallel if running on …
Bad Idea Jeans: Query Optimization Through Minification
SQL is pretty verbose compared to some languages. It’s a pretty big disappointment that I have to type out select customer from dbo.customers where id = 2 instead of a much simpler syntax like dbo.Customers ' Customer like Powershell might offer. As I considered the disappointing verbosity of sql server, I considered that perhaps one way to reduce network traffic, save electricity, and aid the garrulous language known as sql might be to require all code running to be minified.Think about …
2016
ManicTime - Timetracking Automation Done Right
Tracking time is always a beast. With the amount of context switching many developers do, it can be tough to remember how much time went to each project. With companies looking to track effort on sprints, hours on a client project, or (as in my case) just a dev wanting to better …
Dynamically Set Powershell Variables from json
I created this small snippet to allow a list of values from a json file be turned into variables to work with. For working with a fixed list of configuration values, this might be helpful to reduce some coding effort.
The Traditional Birthday Song Is Terrible
The traditional birthday song is terrible.It’s never really changed. It’s like singing a dirge. It’s really really hard for people to sing anywhere close to on key. We all sing it because we have to, but there is this feeling of regret, like “I’ll do it for you, but just because I love you”. It is followed by “Many mourns” by the closest available family clown. Apparently, the roots were back in the 19th century, and wikipedia says:
In 1988, …
Scan folder of dlls to identify x86 or x64 compiled assemblies
Point this at a directory of dlls and you can get some of the loaded assembly details to quickly identify what type of processor architecture they were compiled for.I did this as I wanted to explore a large directory of dlls and see if I had mixed assemblies of x32 and x64 together from a visual studio build. Some dlls with invalid assembly header information were found, and this skips those as warnings.
Attaching Database Using SMO & Powershell
Steve Jones wrote a great article on using this automation titled The Demo Setup-Attaching Databases with Powershell. I threw together a completed script and modified it for my functionality here. MSDN documentation on the functionality is located here Server.AttachDatabase Method (String, StringCollection, String, AttachOptions)I see some definitive room for improvement with some future work on this to display percentage complete and so on, but did not implement at this time.
For the nested …
Parallel Powershell for Running SQL
This is just a quick look. I plan on diving into this in the future more, as I’m still working through some of the changes being made in the main parallel modules I utilize for SQL server. In the meantime, if you are looking for a quick way to leverage some parallel query running, take a look at PSParallel. I’ve avoided Powershell Jobs/Workflow due to limitations they have and the performance penalty I’ve seen is associated with them.For my choice, I’ve explored …
Get Backup History for All Databases in Server
Here’s a quick snippet to get a listing of the database backups that last occurred on a server. Most solutions provided a single backup listing, but not the brief summary of the last backup details I was looking for.
Pizzicato Pizza
Had a blast making this song. Unfortunately, creating video of slow motion pizza cutting was going to be a bit awkward to do, as I didn’t feel like asking a pizza place to let me stand behind the counter and video pizza assembly. :-)Best listened to with headphones, not a phone speaker :-)
This was an experimentation with several new tools for me.song creation
I first used Presonus Studio One 3 to record some basic track parts like the guitar. I then added some drums using BFD3 …
Data Compare on Temporal Tables
I hadn’t seen much talk on doing data comparisons on temporal tables, as they are a new feature. I went through the exercise to compare current to historical to see how Red Gate & Devart handled this. I’m a part of the Friends of Red Gate program, so love checking out their latest updates, and I’m also a regular tester on Devart which also provides fantastic tools. Both handled Temporal Tables with aplomb, so here’s a quick walk through on how I did this.
SSMS …
Fixing Untrusted Foreign Key or Check Constraint
Untrusted constraints can be found when you alter/drop foreign key relationships and then add them back without the proper syntax.If you are deploying data through several tables, you might want to disable foreign keys on those tables during the deployment to ensure that all the required relationships have a chance to insert their data before validation.
Once you complete the update, you should run a check statement to ensure the Foreign Key is trusted. The difference in the check syntax is …
An Internet With Less Ads - Adguard
Ads…I know they employ people, make the world go round, gave us google…. but seriously I hate almost all ads.
If my ranking in google search drops to the end because of this post… well…. I’m ok with that.
Adguard
I’ve been using this for over a year as a beta tester (they provided license for me to test and use latest versions). I had a perfect case to demo the craziness of some sites with ads vs using Adguard the other day and figured I’d …