This post is part of T-SQL Tuesday visit the link to see more posts by other authors! Running a local group is a significant commitment in time, energy and sometimes money. For T-SQL Tuesday I wanted to talk about all the ways I’ve managed to eliminate costs where I could. (For the purposes of this post we’ll start with the assumption that things have returned to normal and in-person meetups are safe and reasonable.

Redgate’s tool SQL Multi Script is super handy: you can execute a script (or scripts) against any number of SQL Servers in your estate. The catch is Multi Script needs to be aware of them. If you have a large estate this can get cumbersome fast as you have to individually add each server. There is hope though: If you have a colleague that has already done so they can export their list(s) and you can then import them.

Yep it’s kind of as gross as it sounds. But there’s a good chance that you have implemented a very nice CI\CD pipeline for part of a vendor database that you are allowed to customize. Unfortunately you don’t always know when they might log in to do a hotfix or patch and you may have dependencies on objects that you don’t own. Automation to the rescue: Previously on this site I outlined how you could audit your SQL instance using free/open source tools.

Back in August I talked about how our organization was using Jekyll to publish our internal docs. This fall I took it a step further and worked out how to publish content generated by Redgate’s SQL Doc. SQL Doc is handy tool that will allows you to easily add meta-data to your database. It’s great: you essentially comment every table, column, view, schema etc. and then commit those changes to the code repository itself.

I had some great questions after my SQL 101 session at PASS Summit last week about auditing access and actions on SQL Server. I’ve recovered enough that I can now coherently share what I’ve set up for some free1 rudimentary auditing of SQL Server. We use Redgate’s SQL Monitor to keep tabs on our SQL environment. We started initially with this extended events session to detect database changes for a monitoring alert.

Source control is (has?) taken over and the recommendation is that pretty much anyone in IT should probably be using it. Beyond application development source control is use for anytime you have text documents that you need shared editing access to source control is something you might want to consider. Git is a widely used source control system and it is… difficult which is why it’s not too hard to find content like this: