The Ashdar Partners Blog

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...