The Ashdar Partners Blog

Ashdar Partners (that's me) has recently rebooted our web site. You can see it  here .  It fulfills all of our requirements, which are: Have a web presence, because it shows at least some minimum level of competence. Be as simple as possible, because simpler is better. Be served entirely out of GitHub, because GitHub seemed easier than Azure. That is all.

Recently, Microsoft announced that they will be sunsetting Azure Data Studio (ADS).  In other words, ADS is off to Software Valhalla, where it will join Query Analyzer and SQL Enterprise Manager. (And SQL Server for Itanium and SQL Server for Alpha and Multiplan and Professional Development System and QuickBasic and QuickC and many, many other things (Microsoft or not) that exist only as memories.) This announcement  was a bummer, but I was surprised at my lack of surprise. It was more of a "yeah, I guess that makes sense" rather than a "oh, wait-what?" or "I thought they were going to get rid of SSMS". Remember when Microsoft helpfully (?) installed ADS when you installed SSMS? I've been using SSMS since SQL Server 2005 When I started working with SQL Server, I used Query Analyzer because that is what was available. Which means that I used Query Analyzer for about six or seven years. How could it have been that long? No one remembers good old QA anymo...

I hope that you are all safe in this time of COVID. I am (slowly) working through the "Automate the Boring Things (with Python)" class over at Udemy. I am keeping my code/notes/experiments in an open GitHub repository . You can read my raw files and see how I think when I write programs in a language I am not at all familiar with. I have also been (slowly) updating my old "Tools I use" wiki at github . This includes things like programmer's editors and some of the languages I have used over the decades.

Lately, I have been trying to up my game a bit and one of the things I am doing is using some of the latest tools and bits of things. (Partly, this is because I have been working with some old technology lately and I am feeling "dated". Ask me about Fox Pro, if you dare.) PowerShell After many years of not seeing value in updating, I am moving to PowerShell 6. (Version 6.2, specifically.) Frankly, more things work than I expected. I haven't seen any performance regressions and things have gone smoothly. I think I spent more time incorporating the PowerShell version into my Prompt function than anything else that I had to do because of the upgrade. SSMS I am running the absolutely-latest build of SSMS. I skipped some SSMS builds when the removed the diagramming functionality. Now that it has been put back into the product, I am on the update train again. Aside: The diagramming feature isn't awesome but it is easy to use, requires no installation, doesn't ...

(Actually, they are up to version 1.0.2 already.) I've been using DbaTools for a number of years. I have come to rely on it more and more. Now, I find it at least as deeply entwined in my PowerShell code as the SqlServer module is. All right-thinking people use DbaTools. And you should, too. More seriously, DbaTools is one of the few PowerShell modules I absolutely rely on, on a daily basis. I use DbaTools so frequently that I can't easily categorize it all. In short, I can: Check servers, instances, databases, disks, security and many other things for issues on a daily basis Check business rules on a daily basis Restore databases to test environments on an ad-hoc basis. I have this working so smoothly that I forget that I have Ola Hallengren's backup scripts actually running the database backups.  Load data into databases Extract data from databases I've never actually used DbaTools for it's original purpose, which was migrating databases and instan...

If you want to see a cool ten-minute, "lightning" demo of how you can use PowerShell and Excel together to analyze data or produce nice reports, watch this YouTube video , from 7:47 to 18:22. This is presented by Doug Finke, the author of the Import-Excel PowerShell module.

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