SQL Saturday 723, March 24, 2018 in Rochester, NY. Join us and kick your SQL Server knowledge up a notch!

If you are a SQL Server professional and are interested in spending a day with a bunch of other like-minded individuals, SQL Saturday is for you. It’s a day chock full of SQL Server related presentations given by other members of the community.

This year I’m excited to give 2 presentations!

Painting with PowerShell. I’ve given this presentation before and am excited to be able to do it here again.

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SQL Saturday 622. Join me July 29, 2017 in Albany, NY and learn to Paint with PowerShell!

If you are a SQL Server professional and are interested in spending a day with a bunch of other like-minded individuals, SQL Saturday is for you. It’s a day chock full of SQL Server related presentations given by other members of the community.

Here is a glimpse of my presentation on SQL Server Automation using PowerShell taken from the SQL Saturday event page.

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SQL Saturday 619. Join me April 29, 2017 in Rochester, NY and learn to Paint with PowerShell!

If you are a SQL Server professional and are interested in spending a day with a bunch of other like-minded individuals, SQL Saturday is for you. It’s a day chock full of SQL Server related presentations given by other members of the community.

Here is a glimpse of my presentation on SQL Server Automation using PowerShell taken from the SQL Saturday event page.

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Convert User Friendly Retention to DateTime value with PowerShell

I think the title is fairly descriptive so let me put a little context around it for you. In my SQL Server environment we backup our databases to local disk. Unfortunately we don’t have unlimited storage for backups, which means we have to delete the old backups on a regular basis. A very typical practice in the SQL DBA world.

I was writing a new cmdlet for dbatools.io (Remove-DbaBackup to be released in October) and needed to decide how I wanted users to provide the retention for their SQL backups. I’ve seen a very wide range of backup retention requirements in my career (hours, days, weeks, months, years). I could have coded to the least common denominator of hours and greatly simplified my work, but I wanted to find a more flexible and elegant solution. The last thing I wanted was for people to have to fire up calc.exe, or worse yet having to take off their shoes to figure out how many hours were in a month. This is the function I came up with to create a more user friendly experience with my cmdlet.

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Speaking at SQL Saturday 513 in Albany, NY on July 30th - PowerShell and SQL Server

If you are a SQL Server professional and are interested in spending a day with a bunch of other like-minded individuals, SQL Saturday is for you. It’s a day chock full of SQL Server related presentations given by other members of the community.

Here is a glimpse of my presentation on SQL Server Automation using PowerShell taken from the SQL Saturday event page.

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Comparing databases using SSDT

Another Twitter-born blog post! I love getting new ideas from the community. Real world ideas for solving real world problems!

The original question was “Does SQL Compare or others prods allow me to compare 1 “gold” db to the 57 “identical” databases in prod at once? asking for a friend ;)”. The original question and link to the twitter feed is off to the right.

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Speaking at SQL Saturday 526 in Rochester on May 14, 2016

If you are a SQL Server professional and are interested in spending a day with a bunch of other like-minded individuals, SQL Saturday is for you. It’s a day chock full of SQL Server related presentations given by other members of the community.

Here is a glimpse of my presentation on SQL Server Automation using PowerShell taken from the SQL Saturday event page.

If PowerShell isn’t your thing that’s OK. There are plenty of other topics to choose from. With sessions geared toward Database Development, Database Administration, Business Intellignece, Database Security and even Professional Development, SQL Saturday offers a wide variety of content for everyone.

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Use PowerShell to script existing Availability Group creation scripts!

Scripts that write scripts! One of my favorites!

So last night I was up working on an issue with an Availability Group. For whatever reason the cluster resource for the AG would not come online. Looking in SSMS the AG’s on both replicas were stuck in “Resolving”. I beat on the keyboard for almost 2 hours before deciding that rebuilding the AG was my best option. The databases were down and the birds were starting to chirp and I needed to get them back online.

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Speaking at SQL Saturday 487 in Ottawa on April 16, 2016

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If you are a SQL Server professional and are interested in spending a day with a bunch of other like-minded individuals, SQL Saturday is for you. It’s a day chock full of SQL Server related presentations given by other members of the community.

Here is a glimpse of my presentation on SQL Server Automation using PowerShell taken from the SQL Saturday event page.

[Read More]