Database engineer with a passion for automation
I’ve written previously about using containers for demos on my laptop, specifically for my data compression talk. Since I switched those demos over I haven’t looked back- if it’s possible to run my demos off of containers I always choose that option. I recently presented a talk called ‘Life Hacks: dbatools edition’ which walks through…
I wrote previously about how I loved little life hacks and shortcuts for my February T-SQL Tuesday prompt. If you read that you’ll know I use VSCode a lot and really love all the shortcuts available in that program. This is just a quick tip that I’m so glad I found, read – took the…
It’s an interesting time we’re living in right now. I’m based in the UK and we just received the announcement last week that we have at least three more weeks of lockdown. I’ve been working at home for over a month now and I feel really lucky that I can work from home. There are…
I was browsing twitter the other day when a tweet about dbatools caught my eye (I use TweetDeck and so have a column for tweets that contain @PSdbatools). A dbatools bug!! Oh no! One of the reasons this caught my eye was that I’ve seen this error in my environment with that same command. I…
A short while ago (it’s getting further and further away, but let’s stick with short for now) I was a football/soccer player. As with many athletes, I was pretty superstitious as far as my pregame routine. I always felt better going out onto the pitch if everything had gone smoothly as I got ready. I…
I’ve recently found myself in a few situations where I’ve needed a certain lab setup to test something. Most scenarios these days I find myself firing up some docker containers to run demos or tests against. However, there are a few circumstances where you may need a little more than that, perhaps to test something…
I have just a quick tip for you today using the BurntToast module to notify us when a backup is complete. As DBAs there is always plenty to do, so we don’t want to have to sit and watch a long running script to catch the moment when it finishes. Usually what happens to me…
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…
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…