


Why I Make Animated Gifs for Presentation Demo Backups

Thinking About Robert Davis

Building my schedule for PASS Summit 2019
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.

Workshop Report: Overcoming Obstacles on the Journey to Continuous Delivery for Databases (video with transcript)
In this video, Freyja the puppy and I talk about a recent workshop which I facilitated at the IDC DevOps conference in London.

Setting a Custom Variable in an Azure DevOps Pipeline with PowerShell
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.

Git Command Line Tutorial with SQL Change Automation for SSMS (video)
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.

Key Findings for Database Professionals from the Accelerate State of DevOps Report 2019

Azure DevOps: How to Set a Custom Release Branch Folder Filter in Build Pipeline Triggers (video)
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!

SQL Server Management Studio is as Relevant as Ever
Sometimes you keep a classic around.

How to Persuade Your Company to Change
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.

Managing Cross-Database Dependencies in Builds (Redgate video)
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.

How Developers and DBAs Collaborate in a DevOps World (video)
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?

A letter to my 20 year-old self

DBAs: Stop Denying Sysadmin to Developers
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.

What's Unique About SQL Saturdays: Nearly Everyone Interacts with Other People
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.

How to recognize the early stages of burnout, and my treatment plan
I recently realized that I’m in the early stages of burnout.

Paying down technical debt
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.

What is Automation?
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.

Should release cadence be slowed if you don't have database load testing?
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?”