Database engineer with a passion for automation
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…
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…
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…
Have you ever had someone send you the name of a SQL Server and database to do some work, but when you try to connect to the server you can’t? Then,come to find out, there are four named instances on the box and you don’t know which one hosts the database? No? Just me? Luckily,…
Recently I was tasked with troubleshooting an incident on a SQL Server at a certain point in the past, the issue being a high CPU alert. It’s hard (without monitoring solutions set up) to go back in time and determine what the issue is. However, one thing we can check is the windows event log…
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…