Database engineer with a passion for automation
It’s time for February’s monthly blog party. This month is hosted by Mikey Bronowski (b|t) and he’s asking us to write about our ‘tools of the trade’. He’s looking for those tools that make our lives easier, ones we couldn’t imagine going without. Thanks for hosting Mikey, can’t wait to read everyone’s contributions and add…
I was listening to a podcast last week about PowerShell, when one of the hosts mentioned having to ‘up arrow’ back through your history to find a command you wanted to rerun. This made me realise that I should write this quick post on using PSReadLine’s interactive search function. This tip is a serious time…
When granting permissions to SQL Server resources we have a few options. One option is to grant permissions to Active Directory groups instead of individual users. This has several benefits, for example, improved security over using SQL logins, and the ability to create a separation of duties when controlling database access. However, it does add…
Have you ever wanted to quickly backup/restore a database to the same instance to do some side by side testing? Perhaps to make some index changes or code changes, without actually changing the live copy of the database? Ideally you’d already have another environment for this sort of work, but even then sometimes it’s handy…
This was the 3rd year I participated in the Advent of Code (AoC). If you haven’t heard of AoC, it’s an advent calendar of coding puzzles. Each day between December 1st and 25th a two part puzzle is released, you can use whatever language you want to solve it, with the goal being just to…
Last week I gave a presentation at Data South West on dbachecks and dbatools. One of the questions I got was whether you could run dbachecks against Azure SQL Databases, to which I had no idea. I always try to be prepared for potential questions that might come up, but I had only been thinking…
It’s no secret that I love dbatools and dbachecks. I am certain that I run a dbatools command at least once a day. It has fundamentally changed how I work as a dba, and it makes my life so much easier. I mention this when I’m presenting on these topics, but today I want to…
In an ideal situation it probably shouldn’t matter which node of a failover cluster your resources and roles are hosted on, but the real world is often far from ideal. This post will talk through how we can record the current owner nodes and then use Pester to ensure we’re in the ideal configuration. This…
Thanks to Elizabeth Nobel (b|t) for hosting this month’s T-SQL Tuesday party and apologies for being as late as possible to the party! I love the topic of automation so felt sure I’d write something and then time slipped away. Luckily Mikey Bronowski (b|t) convinced me that it wasn’t too late to write something on…
I got a message from a friend on Twitter last night asking ‘Is there an easy way to get dbachecks backup info into an Excel spreadsheet?’. I sent them a couple of ideas, but figured this is a great use case that many people might be interested in. Pairing infrastructure testing using dbachecks with creating…