So this is a thing: I was nominated as an outstanding volunteer for PASS for April 2018. I really appreciate that someone thought I was doing something outstanding. I am bad at both accepting compliments and self promotion. I really believe in the PASS as a positive extension of the SQL community. I know that I wouldn’t be where I am today without the generous and helpful people who want to help myself and others do and be their best meeting the data needs of our respective employers/clients/organizations.

My road to tools has been both short and long. Short because I started out (just a few years ago) and didn’t think I needed much more than a connection to the database and my own brain. Long because I also had not yet had the misfortune of discovering how much pain good tooling can eliminate. It started one crisp winter day as bright eyed junior DBA when I was informed I would be supporting an internal deployment that evening.

I’ve been taking notes hoping to share some lessons learned from our deployment of Red Gate’s SQL Clone but they kept it so deliciously simply and the documentation and worked examples for PowerShell are difficult to improve upon (also we aren’t doing anything too terrible fancy yet either). My only gotcha was learning that if you don’t use the Redgate extension (.SQB) for backups that SQL Clone won’t recognize that it was compressed and encrypted with SQL Backup (we’ve wrapped an existing backup procedure around the SQL Backup proc that preserved our old naming conventions when we switched to the new backup tool).

I was thinking more about numbers and wanted to provide some further breakdown on our SQL Saturday. It seemed like there was a large number of BI focused people who signed up/attended and that was validated by the numbers: 21% seemed to have a BI focus to their job with titles like BI consultant, BI Developer, Business Intelligence Analyst, Business Intelligence Team Lead, Data Analyst, Data Integration Developer, Information Analytics Manager, Information Delivery Manager, Information Systems Analyst, Manager of Predictive Analytics, Financial Analyst.

Wow! The weekend was crazy but amazing as well. In my best dreams we got a little better than 50% buy in to our first SQL Saturday: I wasn’t sure where all our local DBAs were at and I expected that we’d end up rather student heavy. Instead we had 113 registered as of Saturday morning (including some middle of the night registrations) and 93 bodies through the door the day of: That’s an 82% attendance percentage!

We’ve been re-arranging some deck chairs at work (deploying a new backup tool in our SQL environment). As we’ve been working our way through that we’ve had to update or re-engineer some of our processes for automatic restores to use the new tool. We’re doing one restore though where no one could recall who actually used the restored database. After asking around for a month we didn’t have any better idea of whether the database was actually used or not.