Group exercises beginning around the room Steve Jones and I had a great time today talking about source control for databases and release patterns for performance and availability in Seattle. We had a great group of folks who asked terrific questions, made thoughtful comments, and interacted throughout the day. Here are some links and resources from the day… Suggestion for configuration option to make SQL Server Developer Edition act like Standard Edition This has been requested by the community for many years, but now is the right time to please vote up this suggestion.

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 been more than a year and a half since Robert Davis passed away. I wrote a bit about Robert’s passing last April. I haven’t written about him since, but I think about Robert a lot. I think about Robert when I work on a tough problem that he would have found interesting, when chatting about database nerdery on Twitter, when preparing for a conference or training that I know he would have been excited to attend.

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.

In this video, Freyja the puppy and I talk about a recent workshop which I facilitated at the IDC DevOps conference in London.

Here’s a quick post on something simple which stumped me for a while, in the hopes that search engines help someone else who gets confused in the same way.

Recently, I was doing a bit of work in Azure DevOps Services, preparing a demo for an upcoming webinar. I ran into a simple but frustrating problem.

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.

The Accelerate: State of DevOps Report 2019 has just been published. This report is the latest in six years of research. With more than 31,000 survey responses, Accelerate is the longest running study of DevOps in academia or industry. In the 2019 edition, research continues to show that DevOps drives business value: high performers at DevOps are “twice as likely to meet or exceed their organizational goals.” While this isn’t a new finding, it’s very important that this continues to be true: why invest in improving at DevOps if it doesn’t drive business value?

This is the first in a series of posts about simple things that I had a hard time figuring out in Azure DevOps services.

It can be very useful to enable Continuous Integration for multiple folders in your DevOps pipeline – say, for every branch created under releases/ or features/. But configuring this can be strangely confusing!

Sometimes you keep a classic around.

Like a lot of developers and database administrators, I do a fair amount of short-term problem solving during the course of my normal work week.

Building your database code is an essential practice to ensure that it compiles from source and that dependencies are met. But things can get tricky when you have objects in some databases which is dependent upon objects in other databases – or even circular dependencies.

You’re a DBA, and your development team is all-in on doing DevOps, and they want to include the database. Should your DBA team limit the permissions or options for automation? Or should you instead re-think how your two teams work together?

This post is a part of #tsql2sday, a monthly community ritual where a topic is proposed by a community member and everyone is invited to join in. This month’s topic is from Mohammad Darab, who encouraged us to: “Write your 20 year old self a letter. If you could go back in time and give yourself advice, what would it be?” The advice I would give to my 20 year old self is the same advice I give to myself today, more than 20 years later:

I recent chatted with some folks who have a permissions problem in SQL Server. The permissions problem isn’t technical – it’s a process problem.

Today I was looped in on an email thread about the pros and cons of attending a specific event. One person on the thread asked if any of us had attended the event in the past, and whether or not event attendees were engaged with presenters and vendor representatives.

My immediate thought was: of course the attendees were engaged, because the event is a SQL Saturday.  I’ve never been to a SQL Saturday where the attendees weren’t engaged.

But, I realized that it’s a fair question.

I recently realized that I’m in the early stages of burnout.

One of the cool things that I do as an Evangelist at Redgate is to periodically visit company headquarters in Cambridge. The other Evangelists and I get to meet with every software developer, product manager, and UX designer at Redgate over a series of meetings. That’s really cool. We talk about things that they’ve released lately, what they’re looking at doing in the near future, and we get to give feedback based on what we hear from the community and from folks in the sales process. We also get to share what we personally think should happen in these products now.

Today I got a bit closer to a meaningful definition of automation, as it applies to the software development process. I’ve been turning this concept over in my head for a while, which is partly related to the dreaded question of licensing.

I got a question recently about a panel discussion on Database Development Disasters at SQL in the City Streamed. I had framed a question as, “how fast should development go without load or performance testing?”