Database engineer with a passion for automation
This month our T-SQL Tuesday host, Kevin Chant (b|t), has challenged us to propose a new fantasy feature for SQL Server. Firstly, thanks to Kevin for hosting this month’s blog party. When I first read the invitation I didn’t have any ideas jump straight into my mind. Since then, I’ve come up with two. I’m…
When you enact a configuration against a target node by default the process runs as the local system account. For most of your DSC resources this is fine. However, if you need to access something like a file share, active directory or user registry settings, you might start to run into permission issues. DSC Resources…
Sometimes it’s best not to ask why. However, if for some reason you have a number of triggers on tables within a database that you would like to temporarily disable, read on. I came across a situation recently while automating a process to refresh test environments where this exact scenario came up. As part of…
This month’s T-SQL Tuesday is all about Memory Optimized Tables (MOT), a topic I will admit I know almost nothing about. When they first came out in 2014 I was excited about the new technology and the options that would bring, however I never found a good reason to implement them. Thanks to Steve Jones…
As a SQL Server DBA, aggregating data is first nature. I can easily throw together some T-SQL if I need to get the average sales per product group, or perhaps the number of employees hired per month. Yesterday I was writing a little PowerShell when I came across a problem. I needed to get the…
One of the biggest obstacles people face when using DSC is the troubleshooting and reporting pieces. There are options here to integrate with third party tools to create a more polished enterprise solution, but if you’re going with just straight DSC you might feel it is lacking some in this area. We do however have…
There have been a lot of blog posts and talk around upgrading your servers in the past. However, the chatter always seems to intensify when we start getting close to that dreaded ‘end of support’ date for your older Windows and SQL Server versions. I hope this isn’t the first place you are discovering this,…
One of the reasons I love PowerShell is the comment based help. This allows you to easily get documentation for functions directly within your PowerShell session. By using Get-Help for a function you can retrieve a description, information on the parameters, and examples of how to use the function. Recently I was adding help to…
Well it has been a little quiet here recently. I just (or it’s been two weeks now) got back from a 2 week trip to England and France. It was an amazing trip and there are a few pictures on Instagram if you are curious about what I got up to. This is also going…
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