The Ashdar Partners Blog

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.