I just recently had the opportunity to sit with Aaron Nelson and go through some really cool Powershell features, and I’m certainly going to spend time getting to know Powershell a lot better. If you didn’t know, Powershell isn’t exclusive to Windows anymore – you can actually run a basic set of Powershell features, called Powershell Core, on Mac OS and Linux as well.
But there’s a problem.
You may think that speaking at usergroups and conferences is reserved for a select group of elite professionals. Let me tell you right away that this is not the case, and that you should seriously consider a rewarding side career as a speaker at usergroups and conferences!
Here’s the why and the how.
Typically, the advice on fill factor is “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”. But occasionally, you’ll find a database or even a server with a crazy default setting that just fills your disk and buffer pool without any real benefit. Here’s a nifty script to rebuild any tables and indexes to a fill factor of 100%.
We need to talk about the nullable columns in your database. Specifically, because of how NULL values are compared, they can dramatically affect how some lookup operations perform.
Regular readers of my blog will know that I occasionally share some useful scripts on my Downloads page. And even though I update some of those scripts regularly when new versions of SQL Server come out, or if I run into a bug feature, there really hasn’t been a practical way for readers to subscribe to those updates or to contribute with good ideas.
I recently attended the annual PASS Summit conference in Seattle, and as part of my personal goal to try to learn new (and scary) things, I took a precon on working with Git.
So as of now, a bunch of downloads are available on GitHub (which is, really, a much better place to host scripts than a shared Dropbox link). You can download them as usual, and if you want, you can add your improvements and send me a pull request. I know I’ve received a ton of good ideas and suggestions over the years, but more often than not, I haven’t had the proper environment to test those changes in, or I just haven’t had the time to dig into my old code.
But now you can:
I take all my conference notes on my laptop, or occasionally on a tablet. Sometimes, I’ll want to take a screenshot of a powerpoint slide or a demo to add to my notes.
Here’s a trick to beautify those screenshots very easily:
The Microsoft Office Lens app (App store | Google Play) is an excellent document scanner, that you can also use to snap pictures of business cards, signs or basically anything rectangular with a little contrast around the edges – like a projector screen.
It’ll identify the framing and correct the image, so you can save it as a picture or a PDF, or beam it to another mobile device or computer.
Point it at the screen:
… and once you’ve taken the picture, it’ll beautify the image:
This is a killer app for conferences.
I often manage to get a smile (ranging from surprised to knowing) from people when I open my backpack to fetch a cable adapter, so I figured I’d write a short post about what I carry with me every day.
I like that there is a “Compare” function right out-of-the-box in Visual Studio, and even though many regular developers will choose to download a third-party application for the job, it’s perfectly fine for me.
Two problems: First off, I couldn’t find a straightforward way to open “compare” in the Visual Studio IDE without right-clicking an existing item in a source control repository. And second, wouldn’t it be cool if we could put a shortcut to it on the Windows “Send to” context menu?
Some operations in SQL Server will turn your entire query plan serial (single-threaded), others will just reserve a so-called “serial zone”. I read up on this stuff a number of years ago (including a great post by Paul White), and thinking that some things must have changed since, I decided to go see for myself.
I’m the type of developer that invents wheels. Yes, every wheel I design is unique in its own way, and hand-crafted for a specific purpose. And so it has also been with calendar dimensions (typically when I do data warehousing work).
This got me thinking – why not design the mother of all calendar dimensions? One that includes every conceivable calendar and property that I and others could use and re-use. One that could save me a ton of coding, and lessen the burden of having to validate it each and every time?
And that’s how I got started designing my one calendar script to rule them all.