My Road Map….Someone folded it (T-SQL Tuesday #42)

This month’s T-SQL Tuesday is brought to us from Wendy Pastrick (Blog |Twitter). She wanted us to talk about the road map in our career or what we have done to get to the point we are now in our career.  

This is an interesting idea for me for 2 reasons.  1.  While you are reading this I’m driving to Las Vegas for a conference for my company.  So you could say I’m driving on my road map now!  The other reason I’ll explain below.

Personally it’s very interesting for me to look back on my Road Map since it’s changed greatly since when I started.  I can still remember being a Customer Service Lead and talking to my manager when she asked me where I wanted to be in 5 years.  I said I was hoping to get a CAN/CNE certification and be a Network Administrator.  6 months later we inherited a Database app from another company and my life changed forever.  I became the accidental DBA we all talk about and from that point forward started a path towards the data world.

Fast forward about 10 years and here I am facing another new path.  For the last several months my focus and time has been on the Hadoop Ecosystem.  1.5 years ago I started with a new company and ran into a similar problem I’ve faced many times.  Reads/Writes contending on the same SQL DB because we had no reporting environment to send the queries against, I set out to create such a reporting environment and both succeeded and failed in a lot of ways.  We’ve decided now to take the good from that environment and migrate it into a Lamp/open source system that can horizontally scale at an excellent cost to the company.  We are about a month out from some really serious testing of the system and I’m about as excited as I have ever been about any technology I’ve used.

What my “Road Map” has taught me through all these years is best summed up by one of my all-time favorite sayings.

“It’s not about the Destination, It’s about the Journey”

I’ve learned that even though I have had many destinations on my road map, the place that I’ve learned the most and grown the most as a Data Professional were the times when I went on a journey to find something.  My suggestion to anyone working on the Road Map is pick out some destinations but make sure you take that road less travelled from time to time.  I think you will find you will look back on those times more than any destination you reach.

Good luck in your Journey!

T-SQL Tuesday #36 SQL Community how you can get involved

Today’s T-SQL Tuesday topic is on the SQL Community.   Let’s start with the housekeeping side of things.  This is a T-SQL Tuesday post.  This time hosted by Chris Yates (B|T). The Topic is SQL Community.

So how has the community helped me?   Well really everything I’ve done has been thanks to the community.  Thanks to Wayne Snyder and Rick Heiges for really inspiring me to get into volunteering all those years ago in Orlando in 2004.  That kick started my participation not only in my local community but nationally in the PASS Organization.     It helped me to meet up with great friends Allen Kinsel and Thomas Larock as well they kept me wanting to continue to volunteer and help the community.

I have spent the last 8 years volunteering for the SQL community and doing my best to give back to the community.  I figured the best way I could help with the post is to give you some ways you can start by getting involved in the community and helping out.

1.  Find your Local SQL Server SLC User Group and ask if you can help organize a meeting. PASS Chapter List

2.  Present locally, Find a topic you are passionate about and offer to present at the local chapter.  Pass chapter List

3.  Volunteer for PASS, You can find the volunteers page here to contact PASS.

4.  Volunteer at a SQL Saturday, You can find the list here and contact the organizers.

5. Mentor a fellow Data professional.  Even if this is just at your own office or a friend from another company getting together and helping others can get you started in the community.

6.  Start your own SQL Chapter.  If you are really adventurous and up for a challenge get started by starting a chapter.    You can find more information at the Chapter link above.

These are all great ways you can get started in the community, so get out there and help out!  Regardless of what you choose to do whether to help others or not you should get involved in some way you will be very thankful you did.

T-SQL Tuesday #15 Summary

T-SQL Tuesday #15 is over!

This summary took me a little longer than I expected thanks to a late night of production work on Tuesday.  Wow 34 blogs for T-SQL Tuesday this time.  I really enjoyed reading everyone’s post on Automation.   Many of the tasks that I’m working on since coming to a new company are in the blog posts below.  It will be great to put these tasks to use quickly in my new position.  Hopefully this summary will help others as well to easily find all the answers they need on Automation.

Here’s a link to the original blog post detailing all the information about T-SQL Tuesday #15.

Muthukkumaran Kaliyamoorthy started us off showing how to collect critical errors from SQL Server and sending them out through DbMail.

Robert Cook Aka SQLMashup tells us all about the types of automation tools that you can utilize to make your life easier.  He gives a lot of options and many links about the tools.  Great resource to check out love the Pizza analogy as well.  🙂

Pinal Dave aka SqlAuthority Pinal talks about the good and the bad of Automation.  Sometimes Automated jobs can go very wrong and hurt more than they help.  I like his perspective on this.

Rob Farley Gives us a quick reminder that automation is very helpful to our day to day lives.

Noel “Not Null” Mckinney reminds us that T-SQL can automate just by utilizing it for what it was designed for and keeping others from re-inventing the wheel.  Good job in setting them straight Noel.

Jason E Bacani Jason tells us how to use data driven subscriptions in SSRS to automate the checking of data on a day to day basis.  I agree if you can automate something you should!

Sankar Reddy lets us know to automate our backups and make sure to automate the testing of the restores.

Nick at Dev blog tells us all about the RED product by Wherescape to automate the DataWarehouse load process.  Looks like an interesting tool for loading data.

Robert Hartskeerl tells us to look into powershell and how much it can really do even though we may still be wired for T-SQL.

Mark BroadBent AKA Retracement tells us when some good times to use Automation are and gives us an Awesome script to create a restore script of our database.  Execute caution where you run this one.  🙂

Bob Pusateri gives us a most excellent script in powershell to test our backups.  I was just telling my team to start a project on this exact topic.  They will be starting at this excellent post.  Thanks Bob! 🙂

Ted Krueger shows us a great powershell script using regex to strip off Nolock out of statements.  I could see this easily adapted to lots of cases.

Jonathan Kehayias aka The Rambling DBA gives us a great post explaining the steps you need to take to automate and manage a large scale SQL Server environment.  Even if you don’t have a large scale environment there are great suggestions in here check it out.

David Howard warns us to not get stuck in a Dave process.  Automating at the start will save you more time in the end.  I appreciate the warning from someone that has been there done that as well.  🙂

Chris Shaw poses the question of when do tables need re-indexing and suggests checking out Michelle Ufford and Ola Hallengren’s scripts on Re-indexing.  Having worked with these scripts before I would suggest checking them out!  Check out the post for the links.

Allen Kinsel gives us a simple and easy to use script to grant permissions on objects.  Since I’ve written almost the exact script years ago I’ll gladly call it automation.  I’ve used my variation hundreds of times to save many hours of work.  🙂

Grant Fritchey gives us suggestions on how to keep a server side trace going all the time.  Great suggestions from grant on what you should do to maintain the trace. I typically keep my server side trace running every 15 minutes to store the file and load it to the table.  I have this fully automated so it’s just a sql job that runs.

Kerry Tyler aka AirborneGeek gives us a look at how automation doesn’t have to be fancy and you can use the GUI to get you started on your scripts.  I love this approach since I’ve told many people in the past if you want to see how SQL is doing things just script it out and you’ll start to learn.

Steve Jones aka way0utwest reminds us to not only watch the watcher (watch your automation routines) but keep things simple and don’t try to account for every single anomaly.  This is a great piece of advice as I frequently see people get stuck on scope of a project instead of getting the project done.

Matt Velic shows us an excellent way to automate summarization of data and walks us through how to use SQL Agent to make it run daily.  Well written and great information.

Aaron Bertrand walks us through setting up an entire testing environment with Powershell.  This was totally awesome for me as I’ve used VSTS load testing agents a lot at my last position and this hits home as an easy way to get things setup and running.  Great use of automation!

Brian Garraty aka NULLgarity gives us excellent examples of biting the bullet and going with powershell for his automation.  I’m in the same boat on this one and need to jump in with both feet first!  Thanks for the push!

Robert Davis aka SQLSoldier gives us an excellent post on automating and monitoring Db mirroring.  If you’re using mirroring this one would be a great set of scripts to add to your toolbox.

Wes Brown aka SQLIO gives us a great example of automating pulling the IO stats for your db’s from sys.dm_io_virtual_file_stats.  Having written a procedure just like this last year it gives me some great pointers on things I might want to change.  Well done Wes.

Karen Lopez aka DataChick lets us know that the lazier you are the better data modeler you will be.  🙂  Just kidding, she shows us that automating tasks helps you to be more productive in the things you need to be productive in.  Great suggestions that everyone can use to work better.

John Welch shows us a simple and powerful little script to apply XSLT files to XML files changing the xml files.  This is simplicity with powershell at its best IMHO, great job.

Allen White shows us how to create a script with powershell to backup our logs when they get to close to full.  He also mentions a great idea which is automating your automation scripts by making it so objects can be re-created on the fly.  I love this idea as well and try to put it into many of my automation scripts.

Jason Brimhall gives us a script to size out our database before it reaches Prod.  This looks very handy to help you predict what sort of data size you will need in the future.  Great script to add to the toolbox.

Chad Miller aka Sev17 gives us a script to script out all your SSIS packages from the server to the file system.  This can be very handy if you needed to get lots of packages out of the server and into source control or a file backup of the packages.

Tom Powell aka Philergia advises us all to use SQL Server CMS to manage our servers and automate all our tasks.  This is something I’m planning on looking into in the very near future so it’s a welcome reminder!

Brian Davis gives us a script to go through a list of sql servers and grab what account is running the sql server service.  Great use of Powershell and automation, I can see using this in the future!

Jason Fay aka Dba Star gives us a script to let us know not only when SQL Server restarts but informs you of the status of your databases when you do restart.

Aaron Nelson aka Mr Powershell himself, was probably the most excited about the topic (funny since he was one of the last to get in).  He lets us know that powershell is not just about scripting it can be used for automating and mixing lots of tools together.  Along with the 2 scripts he includes in the post he challenges us to find other scripts he doesn’t yet have in his library.  I suggest we all take him up on that.  🙂

Sal Young came in a little late but gives us a quick reference to a previous post on reading SQL logs with powershell and codeplex project to monitor your sql servers with powershell.