The Ashdar Partners Blog

The highlights for this week have been a few videos from the free-to-view PASS Summit 2016 archive, available at PASS.org . Managing SaaS Application Databases with Elastic Jobs: SQL Agent and More for Azure SQL Database, presented by Deborah Dove Essentially, "Elastic Jobs" is SQL Agent for Azure SQL. She also talks about "Elastic Query", which allows you to run queries on all of your databases, or a specific subset of them. Azure Data Services: Spotlight on Azure SQL Database, presented by Debora Dove I think that this is a good introduction to Azure SQL and it covers Elastic Pools. I'm sure that I learned a few things. One thing that bothers ms is the low query/minute ceilings for the various offerings. Design Patterns for SaaS Applications with Azure SQL Database, presented by Bill Gibson If you are going multi-tenant, sharding and employing Elastic Pools seems to be the only sane choice. "Most of our customers are compute-bound, n...

The summer has been busy and my Azure training schedule has suffered. Here are a few highlights from the last few weeks of study. The following are presentations that occurred during SQLPASS Summit 2016. I can't  link to these presentations directly because they are behind a paywall (though it is free to subscribe): Backup and Restore SQL Server Databases in Microsoft Azure, presented by  Andy McDermid and Pinal Dave This presentation is about Virtual Machines, not SQL Azure. My takeaways were: Segregating data, log, tempdb and backup locations is still recommended practice. The "backup to URL" feature can be useful because frees up a disk because it is not needed to hold backup files and writing to a URL doesn't count as bandwidth usage against your VM disks. "Backup to URL" can stripe the data just like writing "regular files" can. You need to ensure that the costs associated with the (required) Azure Storage Account make sense. You...

I found a version of my favorite SSDT presentation (from PASS Summit 2016) on YouTube . On YouTube, it is named "Continuous Integration with SQL Server Data Tools", presented by Jon Boulineau for the Nashville SQL Server Users Group. This seems to be an earlier (?) version of a presentation called "Agile Development Fundamentals: Continuous Integration with SSDT", given at a SQL Saturday. In an earlier blog post, I named the PASS version of the presentation as "my new favorite SSDT video". Both presentations were done by the same person and seem to be the same content. The sound on the YouTube version isn't as good as the PASS Summit version, but you do not have to go through the PASS sign-up process to see it. (Though I do recommend PASS for anyone who wants to know how SQL Server works or how Microsoft expects you to use it.) Jon goes over several things, including an introduction to SSDT, the test project feature and deploying builds. It...

I do not have much to report this week. I've started the Microsoft Professional Cloud Administration course over at edX.org. I've only done the very first units and have yet to form an opinion. I'll be looking at learning a few things about Confluence in the upcoming weeks,as well.

Over the last two weeks, I've been watching PASS Summit 2016 videos. No particular presentation really stands out and I've been watching presentations that cover topics outside of my core competencies, so I haven't been keeping an inventory. I've signed up for an edX course on Azure. I expect this to take up all of my training time budget for the next few months. I've taken short online courses before, including Rhetoric, Learning and Spanish, but this will be my first time taking an edX course. Those low-intensity courses and required only a few hours a week, while (IIRC) the edX course materials state that I should budget 12 hours a week for the next three months. I'm excited to see how a more demanding course will work out.

I have finished watching the PowerShell + DevOps Global Summit 2018 presentations on YouTube that caught my interest. If you have any interest in applied PowerShell, I suggest that you have a look at their playlist . there are nearly 60 presentations and I'm sure that something in there will interest you. If not, PowerShell.org has many other presentations . After finishing up the PowerShell presentations, I went looking for some good tutorials on Jira. I found a lot of marketing, but I didn't find much on useful, implementable details. Some of that seems to be due to Jira being flexible enough to do whatever you want. That's great, but my problem is that I'm not at the point where I know what I want. I will just endeavor to persevere on this front.  For the past week or two, I've been spending more time with Trello than I had been. I had a ten minute look at Kanbanflow , which seems like a worthy competitor to Trello. All of this activity is the fault of my rea...

I've watched so many of the Powershell + Devops Summit 2018 videos in the last week that I've lost track of the best ones. I won't bore you with a list. I'll just point you to the official Ashdar Partners twitter feed . The feed shows all of the videos that I've liked. I have three more videos from the Summit that I want to watch. After that, I'll be switching focus to Jira for a while because one of my clients has adopted Jira and I feel a little lost. After Jira, I'll be going back to the SQL PASS 2016 videos that I put aside a few months back. With my recent certification and the way that the IT universe seems to be going, I am starting to believe that Azure is the future. I'm also on a kick to read more. I have a good local library and I should take more advantage of it. I have three branches within easy driving distance, including the main branch, and I have easy access to any book at any branch through their inter-branch loan system. After f...

I took advantage of the following learning opportunities: PowerShell Team: Using PowerShell From a Browser to Manage Cloud Resources by Danny Maertens on YouTube CSV, JSON and XML (Oh My!) by Jeff Hicks on YouTube WebJEA: PowerShell driven Web Forms for Secure Self-Service by Mark Domansky on YouTube Perhaps more interestingly... Last week, the library didn't have the books I was actually looking for, so I picked up  The Phoenix Project  by Kim, et al. I should have read this book a couple of years ago. I've seen this book recommended as required reading for greater DevOps understanding a few times. I've been following the DevOps movement for a while, at a distance. I haven't paid much attention to DevOps's underpinnings or the scope of it's ideas. People don't hire me to re-engineer their business processes. As I did with TDD over ten years ago, I have adopted what I can of DevOps, according to my understanding of it. "DevOps" is usu...

I am slowly going through all of the PowerShell + DevOps Global Summit 2018 talks that I find interesting. I took advantage of the following learning opportunities: Whip Your Scripts into Shape: Optimizing PowerShell for Speed  by Joshua King  on YouTube Application Provisioning with DSC and Octopus Deploy  by Josh Duffney  on YouTube PlatyPS: PowerShell Help meets Markdown  by Sergei Vorobev  on YouTube Defending against PowerShell Attacks-In theory and in practice  by Lee Holmes on YouTube

I passed the 70-767 Implementing a Data Warehouse  exam this week. I first read Kimball's Data Warehouse Lifecycle Toolkit and The Data Warehouse Toolkit over fifteen years ago, so it's about time. I still have those books, although many other books have hit the recycling bin. A lot of the underlying technology has changed in the data warehousing area, but a grounding the basics of facts and dimensions is still important. I passed the exams for  Querying Microsoft Server 2012/2014  and Administering Microsoft SQL Server 2012/2014 Databases , a while back. My Microsoft Learning dashboard points tout that this third success qualifies me as a "Microsoft Certified Professional". The last time I was Microsoft-certified in anything was in 1998, when I had a certification in Windows 98 desktop support, or some such thing. I don't think I ever did anything with that. Co-incidentally, I used the last of my last business cards while attending a talk on Machine Learn...

Here are the learning opportunities that I took advantage of last week: The Build Release Pipeline Model for Mere Mortals by Ryan Coates on YouTube PowerShell Team: Inventory Your Server Environment and Detect Change at Scale by Jenny Hunter on YouTube

Here are the learning opportunities that I took advantage of last week. Due to my interest in and use of DbaChecks , I need to get a better handle on PowerBI: Introduction to Power BI Desktop  with Dustin Ryan on  YouTube PowerBI seems to be the only reasonable way to visualize the results of the tens of thousands of tests I'm running. I could not resist watching a several things from the PowerShell + DevOps Global Summit 2018. The following are all from the Global Summit: Beyond Syntax: Pester Testing with Dave Wyatt on  YouTube Keynote: State of the Community with Don Jones on  YouTube PowerShell 2018: State of the Art with Jeffrey Snover on YouTube A Historical Architectural Tour of PowerShell with Bruce Payette on YouTube Become a PowerShell Debugging Ninja with Kirk Munro on YouTube I don't usually listen to things like keynotes, but I find that Don Jones and Jeff Snover always have something valuable to share. I am surprised with...

I took advantage of these learning opportunities: Building Your T-SQL Tool Kit: Window Function Fundamentals with Christina E. Leo on YouTube SQL Server Query Plan Analysis: The 5 Culprits That Cause 95% of Your Performance Headaches with Adam Machanic on YouTube   Beyond Pester 101: Applying testing principles to PowerShell by Glenn Sarti on YouTube . The PowerShell + DevOps Global Summit has released their 2018 videos (62 in all!) and all I want to do is watch PowerShell videos all day. Life intervenes, however...

I attended SQL Saturday in Blue Bell, PA. Specifically, I attended these sessions: Effective DW Storage Patterns with Miner Azure SQL DW Migrate On-Premise to Cloud, with Zhang Extending DevOps to SQL Server with Fritchey Data Governance and Master Data Management, with Napoli Successfully Running SQL in AWS, with Carrig I took advantage of these additional learning opportunities: I watched Creative Uses of the APPLY Operator, session 1, with Itzik Ben-Gan at SQLug.se on YouTube I watched Creative Uses of the APPLY Operator, session 2, with Itzik Ben-Gan at SQLug.se on YouTube

The big thing for this week is SQL Saturday #714 , which will be held at Montgomery County Community College on 4/21. I'm writing this post a little early, as I won't have time to write over the weekend. The time I had planned to spend on finishing up 70-767 has been taken up by  finishing up the annual and quarterly book keeping and  a strange issue with my backup laptop (an old Core Duo ThinkPad T500) refusing to update to a recent version of Windows 10. If I get the laptop working, I will post a more detailed entry. Unfortunately, I'm starting to think that it's time to retire the old workhorse or put Ubuntu on it.

I don't know what happened with the date in the title of the last blog entry. I don't think that it will cause any harm to anyone, so I'm going to leave it as-is. Here are the main things I worked on last week (in addition to my 'normal' work for clients, which I don't detail here): I watched several videos from the "SQL Server tutorial for Beginners" playlist on YouTube, which is produced by kudvenkat. As you know, I am not a beginner with SQL Server. Even so, I don't have much practical experience with the LEAD(), LAG() and windowing functions. I've been working on a project where these functions are beneficial, so I am learning more about them. I found the ten or so videos that I watched up around the "Part 110" area to be well-explained. I am up to page 145 in my "Implementing a SQL Data Warehouse" review.  My progress was impeded by having to catch up with the quarterly and annual bookkeeping.

Here is the progress for the week: I watched the "Columnstore Indexes", episode 12 of Kalen Delaney's Weekly Webinar series on YouTube . Kalen references Niko Neugebauer's blog several times in her talk. She also points to the SQL Server Central "Stairway to SQL Server Columnstore Indexes" series of blog postings. I've spent quite a bit of time on a couple of dbatools issues, which has negatively impacted the amount of time I have had to read my 70-767 book. I am only 34 pages into the 70-767 book.

Last week was a very light week for learning. I watched: DSC in a vSphere Environment by Luc Dekens on YouTube . Mainly, I am  interested in DSC as I have moved on from VMWare in my home lab. Test your Powershell code with AppVeyor for ITPros with André Kamman & Rob Sewell on YouTube .

Another snowpocalypse has come and melted. I've been busy, but I haven't made much progress on my training this week. Just about the only thing I have done is this: I listened to a RunAs Radio podcast on " Be the Master " with Don Jones.

This week was very busy (work can be so inconvenient :-)) and I didn't get very far in my studies.  I went through the MVA course on SQL Server on Linux . This is several videos and takes a couple of hours. This required dusting off my aging Linux knowledge. In short, most SQL things are the same. I'm not sure that I would be in a hurry to build a complex cluster just yet, but small, uncomplicated single-instance applications should be fine.  I watched Introduction to Jira & Agile Project Management  with Dan Cuparkoff on YouTube . I'm not unfamiliar with Agile tactics and strategies, but I have not had a chance to work with Jira.  My exam reference book for 70-767 arrived but I haven't had a chance to crack it open.

Here in southeastern Pennsylvania, another Snowpocalypse petered out this week (7 to 13 inches of snow turned out to be 2 to 3 inches of slush) and I took advantage of the following learning opportunities: Performance Troubleshooting made easier New features in Management Studio by That DBAGuy on YouTube PowerShell and KeePass - A poor person's credential database with Christian Lehrer on YouTube Advanced Components in SSIS MS SQL Server Integration Services 2016 with Tim Mitchell on YourTube . This is labelled as "SSIS 2016" but was recorded in 2011. That doesn't matter very much, I've watch Tim present before and it's always illuminating in some way. SSIS Best Practices on YouTube Demystifying $THIS, $_, $PSITEM, $$, $Whatever… with Jason Yoder on YouTube . I realized that the 70-463 exam has been retired and that I should be targeting 70-767 exam. This is what happens when you let things lie fallow for to long. There seem...

My last entry chronicled some of the work I did to get a 'development environment' up and going for the dbatools project. Here are the rest of the details, including the issue with the "BatchParser" DLL error. What I did to get the dbatools Pester tests going on my VM: I checked out a copy of the appveyor project that sqlcollaborative has. This seems to be a requirement for testing with the 'official' dbatools tests, even if you aren't going with a full-blown appveyor workflow. If you want to write your own Pester tests, you can do anything you want to. I created a custom version of configure.ps1 and put it in c:\temp. This informs the Pester tests about my specific environment. I set my SQL Server 2008 R2 and SQL Server 2016 test instances to allow SQL Logins. I do not allow SQL logins on my instances if I can avoid it, but it makes sense to test dbatools features that support SQL logins. Those changes let me run a...

I spent a good amount of time this week getting a system up so that I could actually maybe start contributing code/tests/something to the dbatools project. I've been wanting to do this for a while, but there is a large amount of "stuff" to get working before being able to do "real work" and getting it all done eluded me.  Over the last year or so, I've spent a couple of hours getting up to speed, getting things installed and then run out of time just as I get to the point where I can start working with the code. (You know, the fun part.)  A few months later, I'd give it another go, only to have to spend time fetching my remotes (since I fly solo so often, I'm a perennial newb at some things that I wish I weren't a newb at) and addressing other bit rot issues. By the time I got caught up again, I'd be out of time. Wash, repeat, et cetera and so forth. I still support several SQL 2008 and SQL 2008 R2 instances. I've noticed a...

I spent some time looking at dbachecks. It's got a lot of promise. I need to see how I can integrate it into my existing tests or integrate my existing tests into dbachecks. I've spent some time getting an environment together so I could contribute to dbatools. I'm going through the MVA Jump Start videos for 70-463 again. I watched  Auto-generated User Interfaces with Phosphor with David Wilson at PSCONF.EU 2017.

In no particular order, here are the learning opportunities I took advantage of in the last week: I listened to ReverseDSC with Nik Charlebois on RunAs Radio.  Opinion: The unspoken truth about managing geeks by Jeff Ello. I read this once a year and I recommend it to anyone who interacts with IT people. I watched the "Implementing a Data Warehouse" by "Free Training on YouTube.  I am reviewing what I need to know for the 70-463 exam. I took the 70-461 and 70-462 exams ages ago, then got busy and never got around to taking the 70-463 exam.  The videos are a little dated, since they are from the SQL Server 2012 era. The same firm has videos for  70-462 . There are also old videos for 70-463 at the Microsoft Virtual Academy (MVA) site. I've watched those before, and I should probably sit through them one more time. Why am I reviewing? I never feel "comfortable enough" with SSIS, even though my experience goes back 18 years to DTS, because  I us...

Before I get into the mundane things for this week, I'd like to point out that  all support for SQL Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008 R2 is ending on July 9, 2018 . Microsoft's page covering this is  here . Some things to consider: If you are subject to data regulations such as HIPAA, PCI and perhaps even SARBOX, running an unsupported version of your relational database manager may put you out of compliance.  Even if this is not the case for your organization, migrating to a supported version may provide significant performance benefits. I've never heard anyone say "My database is too fast".  With data compression now a feature of the Standard Edition, you may be able to realize savings in storage space, I/O bandwidth and related resources.  If you have SQL Server 2008 or SQL Server 2008 R2 databases that you need to migrate to a supported version, I can help. Contact me. I have experience with nearly every obsolete version of SQL Server, going all th...

I find that posting these small learning experiences helps keep up by drive to watch them, so I will continue to post them here. I hope that you find them as interesting and/or useful as I did. Here are the online learning experiences for this past week, in no particular order: Monster Text Manipulation: Regular Expressions for the DBA with Sean McCown at SQL PASS Summit 2016. This might have been the clearest explanation of REGEX that I've ever encountered. Scalable Application Design with Service Broker With Allen White at SQL PASS Summit 2015 DBA Mythbusters with Paul Randal at SQL PASS Summit 2015. Paul Randal is always worth listening to. Columnstore Indexes in SQL Server 2014: Flipping the DW Faster Bit with Jimmy May at SQL PASS Summit 2015 Emotional Intelligence for Engineers with April Wensel at ngAtlanta, on YouTube. Application Patterns for Azure SQL Database with Tony Petrossian at SQL PASS Summit 2015 Founda...

I find that posting these "what I've done" entries once a week helps me keep my momentum up, so I'm going to keep doing it. I watched the following talks:   Hadoop Primer for SQL Server DBA  by Konstantin Korobkov at SQLBITs XIV ( The sound quality for this one isn't great.) Python and R for SQL and Business Intelligence Professionals   with Jennifer Stirrup   at SQLBits XIV. Shiny: dashboards in R by Steff Locke (@SteffLocke) SQLBITS XIV   "How to Build a Virtual Test Lab for SQL Server" with Ed Leighton-Dick & David Klee at SQLPASS Summit 2015   "Analyzing your ETL Solution with PowerShell" with André Kamman at SQL PASS Summit 2015 "Change Data Capture Case Study and Checklist" with Uwe Ricken at SQL PASS Summit 2015 The most stand-out moments from last week's efforts include: I altered a SQL Server partitioning configuration that I had set up a number of ...

What useful things did I do last week? I listened to a RunAs Radio podcast on "ReverseDSC" with Richard Campbell and Nik Charlebois I listened to a RunAs Radio podcast on "Making Work Visible" with Richard Campbell and Dominica DeGrandis I watched the SQLPASS Summit 2015 talk "Enterprise Auditing with SQL Server Audit" with Colleen Morrow. I caught up with Kalen Delaney's Weekly Webinar , up to and including Episode 11. These cover a variety of technical details on how SQL Server stores data and are probably too gory for newbs. I have been working on these talks for several months, on and off. Much of the material is familiar to me, but it's easy to forget details here and there. I did learn more about the implantation details of row vs. page compression. I watched Advanced PowerShell Module Development with Visual Studio Code with David Wilson, again. I've never gotten P...

I've been a member of PASS for so long that I'm no longer sure when I actually joined. I attended PASS Summit 2004, which was in Orlando, FL. I must have been a member before then. I started with SQL Server in 1998. I feel like someone from the old, long-dead Swynk.com SQL Server email list suggested that I join. (For the uninitiated, membership in PASS is free and you get access to talks from past PASS Summit events. Even though the talks are two or three years old, many subjects are still relevant and many people are still dealing with older versions of SQL Server. In short, you can get good information from some of the best-educated SQL Server experts in the world.) I don't go to as many of the monthly meetings in Malvern, PA as I used to. The main reason for this is that there are many good online venues that provide good talks on SQL Server. My three favorite venues are: PASS YouTube (many PASS 'Virtual Groups' will publish monthly talks here.) SQLBITS...