Author: Jeff Iannucci

T-SQL Tuesday #119 – Changing My Mind

~ Jeff Iannucci ~ Leave a comment

This post is for the most recent #tsql2sday, a monthly exercise where a topic is proposed by a community member and everyone is invited to post their thoughts on the subject. I’ve read many of these but never participated this before, but when I saw that Alex Yates asked about something in our IT career that we changed our mind about I knew instantly this would be the time to jump into this pool.

Pardon me for getting all meta, but the biggest thing in my IT career that I changed my mind about was whether or not I should even HAVE an IT career.

Let me tell you a story.

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How I applied 13 cumulative updates in 12 minutes

~ Jeff Iannucci ~ 15 Comments

Twitter is a strange place. I mean, aside from all the outrage practice and animal videos.

Last week I sent out a tweet about how I used dbatools to update apply cumulative updates to 13 SQL Server instance in 12 minutes. It got nine retweets and over 40 likes. Now, 40 likes in the grand scheme isn’t much, but for a guy like me with a handful of followers – it certainly gets your attention.

In one of the replies I was asked to put a post together about how I did such a thing (the updates, not the tweet), so here we are. If you’ve never used PowerShell, this might be where you could start. It’s absurdly simple. I mean, it was only five lines in PowerShell, and you could easily do it in less than that.

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Find and fix that troublesome Windows Power setting

~ Jeff Iannucci ~ 8 Comments

For the most part, the default configurations for SQL Server are pretty good. Yeah, there are a few you should definitely change (like say, the ones involving parallelism), but most of the others can be, uh, good enough as is.

But no one really likes “good enough,” right?

So most of us tweak some of these defaults to improve performance. Measure, adjust, document improvement, get a raise. Rinse repeat. And of course, if you’ve spend any time in SQL Server circles you’ll quickly learn one of the biggest improvements we can make for SQL Server isn’t even in SQL Server. It’s the Windows Power setting, which by default is set to “if you don’t need anything right now I’m gonna lay my processors down for a rest.”

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For those who want to be a Junior DBA

~ Jeff Iannucci ~ Leave a comment

I’ve been fortunate to have spoken at a few SQL Saturday events this year, and one of the sessions I’ve had the pleasure of presenting has been about getting familiar with the SELECT statement. It’s a basic session designed for folks who haven’t yet started writing T-SQL, or are who have tried a bit but may seem confused. The session has been well attended, presumably because most people end up having to learn T-SQL on their own.

Then again, maybe it’s all movie references in the session.

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So, my first SQL Saturday presentation had some issues

~ Jeff Iannucci ~ Leave a comment

It’s been a while since I’ve had a new post here, and that’s largely due to the quantity of other things on which I’ve been working. This list of busy-ness – presumably completely uninteresting to you – includes making additional presentations for SQL Server training events.

Which makes for a nice intro to what I wanted to write about today – my first session I presented at a SQL Saturday last weekend in Orange County, California. I suppose some may read this a cautionary tale, but my intention is to let you know that even when you’re neck deep in the weeds (and I’m not even talking just about presentations here) you can still survive as long as you focus on one thing: delivering solutions to your audience.

But before I get to the parts where things went wrong…

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Failovers can’t serve two masters

~ Jeff Iannucci ~ 4 Comments

As I’m sure you’re aware, the career path for a SQL Server DBA is a wonderful journey of growing your catalog of knowledge through unexpected lessons. For example: Did you find out the hard way you need to test restoring those backups? Did you discover you need to enable the dedicated admin connection after a server locked up? Did you learn the unexpected results of using reserved words as object names?

Don’t worry, you’re not alone.

Speaking of reserved words, I recently learned there’s a bit of a situation regarding a certain word and logical file names. Let me tell you a story.

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PASS Summit 2018 brain dump

~ Jeff Iannucci ~ 1 Comment

Much like your paycheck, this post is two weeks after the fact. But also like your paycheck, it’s got a good deal of personal importance. I’ve taken a couple weeks to let the experience of attending my first PASS Summit marinate in my brain sauce, and now I’m ready to server up my thoughts.

You know what? Scratch that analogy. That’s a little too Hannibal Lecter.

So after fumbling the opening, here’s what I remember about PASS Summit.

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Don’t believe the myth TRUNCATE TABLE isn’t logged

~ Jeff Iannucci ~ Leave a comment

Remember the Bill Gates email hoax? The one that claims to be some sort of Microsoft beta test saying Gates is going to pay cash money to anyone who forwards the email? I’m pretty sure it’s been around as long as actual email.

You knew that wasn’t real, right? It’s a myth. And speaking of perpetuated myths…

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How to create a presentation in 30 easy steps

~ Jeff Iannucci ~ 4 Comments

As I mentioned previously, this week I presented my first public SQL Server training session. I’m truly grateful for this opportunity because after all the work I put into preparing the session I believe I ended up with something that has value for just about anyone who writes T-SQL.

But for now, let’s have a few words about the words “all the work”.

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