sql

We’re thrilled to announce Redgate Streamed: a 3 day online virtual community conference, to be held April 1-3, 2020. Register at Redgate.com/RedgateStreamed In this 9 minute livestream, I give you a rundown of the event schedule and tells you why I’m excited about each session. For every registration that attends Redgate streamed, live or on-demand, we’ll donate $1 to the World Health Organization’s COVID-19 response fund (in addition to a separate donation we’ll be making.

I’m introducing a series of “learner’s guides” – overviews of a given topic, chock full of links and references. For this first post, the information is based on what I learned when I was part of the team at Brent Ozar Unlimited who put together the original First Responder Kit and built a related consulting practice using those tools.

Note: This post is based on an editorial I originally published over at SQL Server Central Years ago, I worked on a fabulous team of eight database administrators We supported more than a hundred developers who worked in an agile fashion. When I first joined the DBA team, we had a shared on-call rotation, but each DBA specialized in a certain area of the environment and regularly met with the development teams working on that area.

I learned an interesting thing about ALTER VIEW behavior in SQL Server when applied to indexed views. This is covered in the product documentation, but it’s not something I would have expected: ALTER VIEW can be applied to indexed views; however, ALTER VIEW unconditionally drops all indexes on the view. ALTER VIEW documentation When I first heard about this behavior, it sounded like a bug to me: why should an alteration like adding a column to a view remove all the indexes?

Redgate is growing, and we have some fresh, new open positions around the world which would be a great fit for SQL Server developers or DBAs who would like to transition to a customer-facing role and develop expertise in Redgate’s solutions for Compliant Database DevOps. Here are the listings and locations for three of these roles:

In the past week or so, the Microsoft Data Platform community has begun having a discussion about inclusivity, both on Twitter and across community blog posts.

This conversation began when a member of the community shared their story about being repeatedly mis-gendered and additionally feeling excluded, unwelcome, and hurt at a series of community events.

When implementing any kind of automation for database deployments, it’s important to implement safeguards for your production environment. This is needed even in the best conditions when team members collaborate well and there is a high level of trust, for a very simple reason: accidents happen easily!

I asked a question on Twitter yesterday: what is the best high availability option for a SQL Server 2008 instance running in Azure on IAAS?

In this 70 minute livestream recording, I kick the tires of a fresh new Azure DevOps demo environment showing Redgate’s Hybrid Model for SQL Source Control and SQL Change Automation.

One of most the fun things about working as an Advocate at Redgate is getting to help clients determine their preferred workflow for database DevOps.

Teams often have unique requirements and are using different combinations of tooling, so figuring out the best way to accomplish what they need typically involves leveraging what I already know, collaborating with my coworkers and the client to generate ideas, researching and prototyping solutions, and then getting feedback from everyone.

I’ve learned a bit about Git in the last year: I’m now quite comfortable creating and managing Git Repos in Azure DevOps. I frequently do demos with SQL Change Automation and  SQL Source control with Git on Redgate’s YouTube channel, and I’ve published a Git Cheat Sheet for the Command Line Interface.

In this 35 minute livestream recording, I commit conflicting code to a Git repo in Azure DevOps Services using Redgate’s SQL Source Control, then step through options to fix the conflict. We first run through an example where we hit a conflict when pushing to the master branch and resolve that. Then we run through an example where we are using a feature branch and identify the conflict when doing a pull request to merge the change into master.

In this six minute video, I explain why you should take the 2020 State of Database DevOps Survey. The survey is open for a few more days – we’ve had a record number of responses, but we want YOUR input as well!

Take the survey at Redgate.com/DevOpsSurvey.

I was fascinated yesterday to come across the term, “Database Reliability Engineering,” which I hadn’t seen before. In this 22 minute whiteboarding session, I talk about why we need new terms for “Database Administration,” and my initial understanding of what Database Reliability Engineering means by comparison.

ONLINE operations in SQL Server were simple to understand for years – we got ONLINE index rebuilds in SQL Server 2005. That was it for a while.

Then, things got more complicated: we got more types of indexes. We got ONLINE options for schema changes that don’t involve indexes. We got more options for managing things like blocking, because online operations are really only mostly online — generally there’s going to be at least a short period where an exclusive lock is needed to update metadata. We now have some RESUMABLE operations coming in, too, for those big operations that are tough to handle.

Chocolatey is a package manager that helps you install, upgrade, and uninstall packages (applications) on Windows quickly and easily from the command line.

I created a cheat sheet for the Git Command Line Interface to go along with my Git tutorial for SQL Change Automation video.

I find the Git CLI to be very friendly and easier to learn than a GUI interface.

PASS Summit 2019 starts up next Monday with pre-conference sessions. I’ve got my schedule all set, and I’m going to be busy: I’m speaking in two full-day pre-conference sessions, giving two regular sessions, judging the ever-exciting Speaker Idol competition, and also spending time at the Redgate booth in the expo hall. Oh, and I scored a little PASS-TV interview to talk about Redgate right before the keynote on the first day.

It’s just ten days until PASS Summit 2019 begins in Seattle. The schedule is up and there are loads of good sessions. Here’s what I’m putting on my calendar to make sure that I don’t miss it – along with some things that I wish I could attend that I’ll be sure to catch the videos of afterwards.

I’m really excited for Redgate’s new SQL Change Automation plugin for SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS). SQL Change Automation lets DBAs and developers use a migrations-first approach to create precise scripts to apply changes to your database. If you’re curious about what I mean by “migrations-first”, read more about this approach, and how it compares to a state-first approach here.