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. …

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”

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.

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 …

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 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 the …

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, …

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 …

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.

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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.

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 😄

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.

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 …

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! 😬

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. 🌮

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.

Why does this PowerShell function’s default argument change value based on the use of . or & to invoke a command within it?

Spent some digging into this and this is what I’ve observed.

First for clarity I do not believe that you should consider the …

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 to work …

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 and …

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 had …

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 oriented …

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

1

robocopy "C:\test\Taco" "C:\Burritos\are\delicious "

This trailing space would be actually used by Robocopy to initialize a directory that has a trailing space in the name. This …

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

• Improvements with SSMS 2016
• Update SSMS With PS1

From a quick review here’s what you have regarding .NET requirements for the database engine.

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. …

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 for a …

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

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, …

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 …

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.

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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.

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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 issues …

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.

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 …

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 ready …

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 insert …

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, …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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.

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 is …

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 …

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 …

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 …

the camps

Once you get into coding fonts, you’ll find that there are two primary camps.

1. 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. :-)
2. Font aficionados “Your world will change forever once you use this specific font! It will increase your productivity 300%”

Inside the …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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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/*******************************************************
    run check on each constraint to …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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.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, …

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.

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 …

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 …

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.

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 :-)

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 (which …

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 2016 …

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 …

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 share it …

Troubleshooting

I ran into an error: The target principal name is incorrect. Cannot generate SSPI context. (Microsoft SQL Server, Error: 0)

I evaluated the sql server configuration manager protocols for sql server and saw that named pipes was disabled. I tried ensuring that this wasn’t causing the issue, but enabling but it didn’t fix. Thankfully, Andrew on StackOverflow had the answer here:

First thing you should do is go into the logs (Management\SQL Server Logs) and see if SQL …

I’ve used Central Management Server registered servers in SSMS for primarily one purpose, saving connections. :-) This is definitely not the intended usage. As I’ve explored the benefits of using this a little more, I put a few notes together to help share the concepts I came across. I was brand new to this feature in SQL server, and found some of the functionality pretty powerful, especially if you are in an environment that has a lot of servers to manage and ensure consistent …

Creating tracks at home can be very intensive in time, so I’m always looking for a better way to bring a larger sound to a track with less effort. One of the big gaps for me has been the drum parts. I’ve evaluated a few options, and finally dived into BFD3 for this latest project that is a post-rock style track. This was my first time diving into BFD3 for a full song, so I had a bit to learn. Disclaimer: BFD3 generously provided me with a copy to evaluate. This doesn’t affect …

I had some cross database comparisons that I wanted to simplify, but ensuring the collation matched. The amount of objects that I would have had to drop and recreate was a bit daunting, so I looked for a way to migrate the database to a different collation.Using the Red Gate toolkit, I was able to achieve this pretty quickly. There are other methods with copying data built in to SSMS that could do some of these steps, but the seamless approach was really nice with the SQL Toolbelt.

1. First I …

Syncovery & Arq 5I’ve tried a lot of file sync/backup utilities.

The primary definition to get right is that there are two main functions people try to achieve with this type of software.

• File Syncing: Syncing Files Between Cloud and Local
• File Backup: Preserving Files, …

For all the dark theme aficionados, or those who just want a better theme than the default, here’s a quick set of directions to update your ISE.1. Go to download a theme from Github > PowerShell_ISE_Themes 2. Unzip 3. Go to ISE > Tools > Options > Colors & Fonts > Manage Themes 4. Import selected theme 5. For consistency, adjust the background and forecolor of the console pane as well as the text background to match if you want to. In my case I took the RGB values from …

I discovered a bit of info on working with float values, while creating a hash value that contained a float value, and a date value.

create unique clustered index ix_clustered_ViewK_Catfood_K
Msg 1901, Level 16, State 1, Line 1517
Cannot create index or statistics 'ix_clustered_ViewK_Catfood_K' on view 'compareCatfood' because key column 'ViewK' is imprecise, computed and not persisted. Consider removing reference to column in view index or statistics key or changing column to be precise. If …

Didn’t see SQL 2016 Configuration manager in the start menu. Ran a quick search to see if this was a common issue and found an article: Quick Trick Where is SQL Server for SQL 2012I looked and found the SQL Configuration Manager for 2016 in the same location: …

I’m a geek, software nerd, and a musician. As I’ve been stagnating lately in my musical progression I decided to dive into trying to produce some recordings of some of my music, hoping to spice up the old brain.I have a lot to learn. It’s pretty humbling, but despite being a musician and a developer with some decent tinkering ability, I’ve found getting into recording and production a bit challenging on certain things. If you come from a background in which you understand …

The following command is run to gain details on deadlocks.

DBCC TRACEON (1222,-1)

However, once the SQL instance is restarted this flag is set back to disabled.

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Had a chance to look at this program thanks to the generosity of the developer. They had a promotion that ended prematurely and they sent me a license as a goodwill gesture. Pretty fantastic service, and thanks to them for this.The documentation was a little sparse for the Windows setup, so I ran into some complications getting it to work.

I have used TouchOSC, and had some difficulty with configuring it for windows. True to other’s postings, Lemur didn’t make this easier. Especially …

The message of this song is one that that has been driving itself home as more and more important to me. We are not viewed in our frailty as we come before God to worship Him. We are not judged and condemned. He doesn’t look and tell us to come back when we are in a better place. Instead, just as the author of Hebrews writes (Heb 10), we can come with bold confidence, knowing that the way has been made for us in Christ, with us being viewed through the “curtain” of Christ. This …

Remote server management is a fact of life for folks involved with sql server. Since we work so often with remote machines I looked into a few tools that provided a better workflow than the default Microsoft tools. This one came out as the winner by far.

A better remote desktop manager

First off, if you are using RDC…. why? At least move up to RDCMan, a microsoft tool that allows for much quick context switching between machines, inherited password settings for a group of servers, and …

If you haven’t explored the visual color coding of tabs based on pattern matches with SQL Prompt, I’d suggest you check this out. Earlier iterations of Red Gate’s SQL Prompt did not change tab color immediately when the connection was changed. Red Gate’s tab color could get out of sync occasionally, so I stopped depending on it.

Apparently this has been improved on and my testing now shows that the tab recoloring for connections is changing when the connection is updated …

These are notes taken from the Houston SQL Pass User group from July . This presentation was given by John Cook, (Data Platform Solution Architect Microsoft) who did a great job with limited time on providing some great details on the new functionality with SQL 2016. To follow him, take a look at sqlblog.com where he posts or follow him on twitter. Thanks to him for the overview.

JohnPaulCook (@JohnPaulCook) on Twitter

Microsoft Data Platform specialist and Registered Nurse

John Paul Cook …

command line install options

ReadyRoll has some great features, including the ability to use without cost on a build server. If you want to ease setup on multiple build servers you could create a simple command line install step against the EXE.

future changes

ReadyRoll was recently acquired by Redgate, so the installer options may change in the future to be more inline with the standard Redgate installer. For now, this is a way to automate an install/updates.

autoupdating via Ketarin

I …

Did some checking as couldn’t find help in the MSDN documentation. My test on SQL 2016 shows that since the column_id isn’t changing, the existing mapping of the description for the column is preserved.

I know it’s probably pretty obvious, but I had someone ask me, so figured proving the mapping for ms_description is maintained would be a good thing to walk through. Score another point for Microsoft, for design practices

In the context of my developer machine, I had log files I wanted to parse through. I setup a log library to output the results on a test server to a sql table instead of text files. However, this meant that my “log viewers” that handled regex parsing weren’t in the picture at this point. I wanted to parse out some columns from a section of message text, and thought about CLR as a possible tool to help this.Ideally, I wanted to feed the results for analysis easily into power bi, …

Giveaway details at the bottom for those interestedDealing with development & sql servers, I like to know what type of network traffic is happening on my machine. What is the overhead of monitoring on network bandwidth, what is communicating across servers or even externally?

What is phoning home?

You can create perfmon counters, but realistically sometimes I just want a easy quick overview of network traffic with minimal overhead. I have been using a utility I came across called Glasswire, …

I know there have been a few other folks going into more detail on SQL Compare 12 (beta), but I thought I’d share just a few looks at the new design. Looks pretty slick, and I like where the design is going. Just a quick look, as I’m sure there will be more to cover when it’s finally released. Until then….

Some GUI Improvements

Very clean. Not too drastic of a change to mess with current workflows. Still, nice to see some clean design like this.

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So I’ve had this tool around for a while, but never found much usage out of it to be honest. I didn’t end up writing a review as I had other tools that did text replacements, and history/session saving. I’ve always considered this tools implementation of SQL History/Tabs saver the best period, even over Red Gate Tab History, SSMSBoost, etc. However, recommending the tool solely based on it’s fantastic history saver wasn’t really something I was going to do.However, …

comparing instances

When working with a variety of instances, you can often deal with variances in configuration that might impact the performance. Without digging into each instance you wouldn’t know immediately that this had happened. There are fantastic tools, like Brent Ozar’s SP_Blitz, but this doesn’t focus on every single configuration value and cross instance comparison. To supplement great material like that a tool like OmniCompare is great.

side by side comparison …

Unveil the inner workings of the esoteric build system…

As a data professional, I’ve never worked extensively with msbuild or other pipelines. I’d been mostly focused on just running schema comparisons and publishing. However, I’ve had the needed to try and deploy a database project from visual studio automatically, and this is my process through it.

There are benefits for those who don’t necessarily want to run this against production, but instead for those who …

Took a class from Jamey Johnston @ SQLSaturday #516 in Houston. Lots of great information covered. Follow him for a much more detailed perspective on R. Jamey Johnston on Twitter @StatCowboy. Did a basic walkthrough of running an R query, and figured I’d share it as it had been a mysterious black box before this. Thanks to Jamey for inspiring me to look at the mysterious magic that is R….

Setup to Run Query

Simple-Talk: Making Data Analytics Simpler SQL Server and R This provided …

data structures are art

If anyone thinks that working with complex data structures is boring… I don’t know what world they live in. The problem is often that sql tables and data structures are just script files and lists of tables in an object explorer.

red gate dependency viewer tracker

I’ve long enjoyed playing around with Red Gate …

Tech changes quick. Reading google postings from something in 2009 is not my first choice.I found an option after digging through some google discussion posts on how to setup the default search in chrome (also applies to other browsers) to automatically apply the advanced filter option for “results in last year”.

1. Go to chrome settings menu

Disclaimer: I have been provided with a free license because I am reviewing. This doesn’t impact my assessment of the tool. I have a passion for finding tools that help developers, and even more specifically SQL DBA/Developers improve their workflow and development. I don’t recommend tools without actually using them and seeing if I’d end up adding to my roster of essentials!

Cool Tool: ISE Steroids

Expanding Powershell ISE

Powershell ISE is simple. Not much fluff, but it gets …

Moving system databases in SQL Server takes a bit of practice. I got that again, along with a dose of SQL humility (so tasty!), today after messing up some cleanup with sql agent server log files.

1

Failed to initialize SQL Agent log (reason: Access is denied).

I was creating a sql template when this came about. SQL Server Agent wouldn’t start back up despite all the system databases having very little issues with my somewhat brilliant sql commands. I had moved all my databases to …

If you want to create a TFS query that would identify work items that have changed, but were not changed by the person working it, there is a nifty way to do this.The filtering field can be set to <> another field that is available, but the syntax/setup in Visual Studio is not intuitive. It’s in the dropdown list, but I’d never noticed it before!

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