I’ve always said that this blog is my way of giving back to the SQL Server community but there is also another reason I write, to learn.

I was chatting with a friend the other day who was thinking about start to write a blog and he was asking me how I find topics to write about. The technical posts that I blog generally fall into two categories; stuff I’ve been working on and stuff that I want to learn about.

I have to admit, when I first started this blog I was writing one post a month and still finding it difficult to pick a topic. I thought that I wasn’t doing anything new, there must be hundreds of blogs on SQL Server so how could I add any value?

It was only after a blog from Steve Jones that talked about that even though, yes, there are a lot of blogs out there you bring something unique to yours…yourself! No matter how much a subject has been covered you will have approached it in your own way.

I think some of the best blogs are the ones that talk about a common problem and what was done to resolve it. Everyone has their own take and there’s some novel solutions out there.

Anyway, back onto the subject of this post. Blogging to learn. We’re really fortunate as bloggers at the moment. There’s a whole host of new SQL Server features out there at the moment so take your pick!

Being the type of DBA that I am I’m generally picking new features of the database engine to investigate but there’s new features everywhere. Blogging about a new feature means you have to read the online documentation, deploy and then test that feature so it really is one of the best ways to learn.

So to anyone out there who’s thinking about starting to blog, pick a platform, pick a feature and, get writing!

Have a good week!

I hope everyone had a good weekend. I spent mine watching probably the most dismal performance of rugby I’ve seen for a long time but there’s still a bunch of matches on before the end of the season so fingers crossed for the next one (not to mention the Lions Tour coming up).

Anyway, I’ve been hearing a lot of good things about Microsoft’s new coding environment Visual Studio Code so bit the bullet last Friday and downloaded it.

I’ve used multiple editors for coding over the years (sublime, atom, powershell plus etc.) but I’ve always ended up back with either Notepad++ or the built-in powershell ISE that comes with Windows. Not sure why but I guess when it comes down to it, all I want is a simple editor that I can configure with minimal fuss. Or maybe it’s just the fact that I don’t write a lot of code, so a simple text editor and SSMS is all I really need.

That’s been changing over the last year, I’ve been working with containers a lot and I’m finding that I’m spending more and more time write powershell code. So I guess it was time to try out Microsoft’s stab at a code editor (it’s been out for a while, and my friend Rob Sewell uses it extensively).

First impressions? I like it, it’s easy to get to grips with and has a really cool feature called Zen Mode that allows you to focus solely on writing code. I’ve also installed the mssql extension but I’m not sure I’ll be using that much, it would be very hard to see what advantages it has over SSMS but I’ll give it a whirl and see how it goes.

Have a good week!

After the latest cyber attack I’ve had a fun weekend making sure all my devices are fully up-to-date with the latest patches. If you’re unaware of what’s been happening, you can read about it here.

I took this as an opportunity to go over all my backups as well. It would be kind of embarrassing for someone who spends as much time as I do at work monitoring and testing backups to not have good backups of my personal devices.

This latest attack one again highlights the need for everyone (companies and individuals alike) to patch regularly and move off unsupported systems.

There is absolutely no reason for anyone to be running older versions of Windows considering that Microsoft offered free upgrades to Windows 10 for over a year.

Sadly it does seem that it takes an incident like this to get some people to upgrade.

Have a good week!

Asking stupid questions

Oh boy have I asked some stupid questions in my time. Most recent was this question that I asked on #sqlhelp last week: –

I was struggling with installing SQL in a container via a dockerfile and couldn’t work out what was going wrong, so I asked this question on twitter.

The #sqlhelp tag on twitter is great and I got a couple of responses immediately telling me that I should check the install log files.

D’oh, I’d completely forgotten about those (it really is DBA 101 stuff). I’d gotten so wrapped up in working with that dockerfile that I’d forgotten the basic ways of troubleshooting a failed SQL install.

As it was, there wasn’t anything in the log file that pointed towards the issue but it made me go back and re-evaluate how I was performing the install. Instead of specifying the install switches in the command line I pointed the install to a config file and boom! The install worked (blog post pending).

I was actually pretty embarrassed about asking that question on twitter but thinking about it, the answers I got lead me to a solution and that was the whole point in asking in the first place!

So to anyone else out there struggling with an issue. Don’t be afraid to ask questions, there really is no such thing as a stupid one.

Have a good week!

Morning all, I know it’s a bank holiday in the UK & Ireland today but some of us still have to work.

Ha, only joking. I wrote this yesterday and am probably still in bed at this very moment!

Couple of cool things have happened over the weekend. The first one is that I finally bought the domain for this site, dbafromthecold.com
I held off on this for too long really, I keep telling myself that I wanted to see if I stuck with blogging before I bought it but it’s been 3 years now so I guess it was about time 🙂

The second thing is that my session on SQL Server & Containers got selected for the next BrentOzar.com GroupBy session.

This will be the first time that I’ve done a full online session and I’m really looking forward to it. I’ve moderated a couple of 24 hours of PASS sessions but running my own one will be a completely different ball game.

I think online sessions are great. Not everyone can get to in-person events so this will allow a lot more people to get training in areas that they are either working with and want to learn more or want to be exposed to something completely new.

I’ve always said that I’ve benefited immensely from the SQL Server community so doing a session like this is my way of giving something back.

Have a good week!