It’s Down Tools Week at Redgate.

In this episode, I share what “Down Tools Week” is, what I’m working on this week, and why I think it’s a terrific experience for fostering creativity, innovation, and teamwork. In closing I share some thoughts on variations of this kind of project which you might use in your own organization.

Many people use entrenched processes for database development that have been in place so long that it’s hard to imagine doing it any other way. In this episode, I share three things that should NOT be normal for database development– but which are incredibly common.

I’m not an expert on collation in SQL Server, but there are a few important facts which I’ve had to learn the hard way. In this episode I share the basics, along with helpful resources to learn more.

No matter what I write in this post, some of y’all are going to tell me I’m wrong. That’s inevitable, because I’m writing about tempdb: a database so complex and mysterious in SQL Server, that even the spelling and capitalization of the database name is a topic of great disagreement. Note: nearly everyone has been inconsistent about this You might think, “This is easy, just check Microsoft’s documentation to find the answer.

Learning Git can be daunting for DBAs. In this 20 minute episode, I discuss why learning a VCS is necessary for DBAs, then give three tips on scoping your project, choosing the right tools, and making sure the project is successful.

I’ve begun working on developing a couple of small habits this month, thanks largely to Andy Mallon’s helpful advocacy.

I’m excited to begin moving over courses from SQL Workbooks and making the material available here. The first course up for grabs is The Dirty Secrets of NOLOCK.

I believe that language matters, and that it is worth our effort to move away from language associated with slavery and racism whenever possible.

I used to make fun of YAML because I was scared of it. I still make fun of YAML, but I’m not scared of it anymore now that Rob Sewell showed me how to avoid having to write it myself.

I’m working on a project where it’s useful to automate environment setup and teardown for testing some devops deployment scenarios for databases using transactional replication.

Thanks to the support of Redgate, I’ve launched a new course which teaches you the basics of TSQL. The course is totally free, no logins required – we don’t even ask for the email address. Check out the course on Redgate University The course is here: https://www.red-gate.com/hub/university/courses/t-sql/tsql-for-beginners Each week has an embedded video for the course, along with a link to the syllabus and scripts. The videos also have a timeline in case you wish to jump to a particular part of the discussion.

Following on from my Learner’s Guide to SQL Server Performance Triage, I’m tackling Query Tuning. In this guide, I’m experimenting with an outline style rather than expanding each paragraph.

I have an idea! Let’s have a “Worst Code Contest.”

When I first began working with databases, I was lucky to land a job at a little start-up which had solid development and operations processes: all our code, including database code, was in version control. We had a strong database architect who instilled good coding practices into the way we managed database code as well: code was expected to be reusable whenever possible.

We’ve got a session coming up in the free Redgate Streamed virtual conference on, “How database DevOps levels up remote work.” When thinking about that session I began thinking about other ways to improve remote work. While I worked remotely for nearly ten years until recently and have established practices which work well for me , moving to another country and the general chaos and uncertainty right now as the world tries to cope with a global pandemic have increased my feelings of worry and loneliness.

I’m giving a session on index tuning at the upcoming Redgate Streamed free online conference. The conference will be held April 1-3 2020, register here and join us!

I love talking about index tuning and I know this area well, so I’m excited to put together this new session. I thought it would be fun to share my process of outlining and creating the session, leading up to the event.

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?