Three perspectives on one person's journey to becoming a speaker in the data community| FLXSQL with Andy Levy
Andy's busy with speaking engagements in the second half of 2025| FLXSQL with Andy Levy
Thank you to everyone who contributed to this month’s T-SQL Tuesday! Here’s a roundup of the posts.| FLXSQL with Andy Levy
I’m hosting T-SQL Tuesday this month and our topic is Managing SQL Agent Jobs. In this post, we’ll be taking a look at a very handy combination of dbatools functions for looking at agent job schedules & performance.| FLXSQL with Andy Levy
This month, I am hosting T-SQL Tuesday for the very first time. T-SQL Tuesday is a monthly blog party originally created by Adam Machanic in 2009 and currently curated by Steve Jones. Each month, a new topic is chosen, published on the first Tuesday of the month and the following month, contributors post their own takes. Anyone can participate. Please publish your post by the end of Tuesday, May 13th in your timezone and on your platform of choice, then leave a comment below or tag me on Blue...| FLXSQL with Andy Levy
This is one of those blog posts you write so that 2 years later, you can look it up to remind yourself how to do something. I found myself needing to figure out if “today” was the end of the month in PowerShell. In T-SQL, this is easy, as we have the EOMONTH() function. But PowerShell (the .NET System.DateTime struct) doesn’t have the same thing.| FLXSQL with Andy Levy
T-SQL Tuesday is a monthly blog party hosted by a different community member each month. This month, Erik Darling (blog) asks us to produce a video You can talk about whatever you want, but it has to be a video Non-video entries will not be televised You don’t have to be on camera You can host the video anywhere you want You must link back to this post so I get a pingback to find your post You must include the T-SQL Tuesday Logo| FLXSQL with Andy Levy
I received a sobering reminder this week of a lesson we all have learned or should have learned long ago. Something I said online came back around months later in a completely unexpected way. That lesson? No matter how careful you think you are online, no matter how private you think an online place is, someone is watching. A few weeks ago, I received an unsolicited email at work selling a software product. It was a pretty vague message, saying “hey, you should try our product to solve this...| FLXSQL with Andy Levy
T-SQL Tuesday is a monthly blog party hosted by a different community member each month. This month, Deborah Melkin (blog) asks us to talk about our relationship with mentoring and sponsorship. This can include: What does mentoring and sponsorship mean to you? What value do you see in mentoring and sponsoring? How have you benefited from mentorship and sponsors? What has worked for you in making these relationships successful? On the flip side, what obstacles have you had to work through? Wha...| FLXSQL with Andy Levy
It seems like no matter how long you work with a system beyond a trivial size, you’ll find something new every so often. A little while ago, I found a table without about a dozen columns, no data, and was referenced in only one place across an entire database hosting nearly 1000 tables and over 8000 stored procedures. Why does this thing even exist? To protect the innocent(ish?), obviously I’m changing the names of everything here. I was looking into some performance issues and found a ve...| FLXSQL with Andy Levy
The week of PASS Data Community Summit 2024 (November 4-8), Bluesky seemed to reach critical mass with the data community as well as the tech community writ large. Over the week, I saw a few posts (“skeets” I guess?) from Jeff Hicks saying that he was working on a PowerShell module for Bluesky. I said to myself “interesting, I’ll keep an eye on that.” On the evening of November 11th, Jeff posted that he needed help troubleshooting an apparent issue on macOS.| FLXSQL with Andy Levy
Sometimes, work tasks and questions that come up in the SQL Server Community Slack coincide. A couple weeks ago, DrData asked With SET STATISTICS IO ON, is there really no way to show the TOTALS at the bottom? There are some nice tools like StatisticsParser but it sure would be nice to see the totals of all values right at the bottom, especially when there are many tables. The task at hand in the office was a need to do the same thing, but with SET STATISTICS TIME ON. So I got to thinking…I...| FLXSQL with Andy Levy
First Things First Thanks to every who came to my session, Asnwering the Auditor’s Call with Automation. Slides and scripts are posted to my Github. The Event! This was Syracuse’s first SQL Saturday was held at the Onondaga County Public Library’s Central Library location, right downtown. This made it a bit of a “homecoming” for me. My first job out of college was across the street from this building and my colleagues and I used to eat lunch in the (no longer there) food court. I ha...| FLXSQL with Andy Levy
I’m happy to announce that I will be speaking at the first-ever SQL Saturday Syracuse on September 7th, 2024. I will be presenting Answering the Auditor’s Call with Automation| FLXSQL with Andy Levy
T-SQL Tuesday is a monthly blog party hosted by a different community member each month. This month, Mala Mahadevan (blog) asks how we manage our database-related code. Where do you keep your database code? Is it in a GIT-based repo, or just in the database the old-fashioned way? Read on for the rest of the invitation, where Mala expands upon the question (and there is a lot to dig into).| FLXSQL with Andy Levy
The Problem While performing an instance migration this spring, I happened upon something I didn’t expect in dbatools. It should have been a simple backup/restore copy of the databases, with the backup files residing on a fileshare on the destination server after being copied there. I kept getting a warning that the backup files I was attempting to restore couldn’t be read, and the restores (via Restore-DbaDatabase) wouldn’t execute. I checked permissions on the server over and over aga...| FLXSQL with Andy Levy
Earlier this year, I embarked on a bit of a project to tidy up the indexes in a sizeable database. This database has over 900 tables, and there are quite a few indexes which I have long suspected don’t need to exist for a variety of reasons. Some indexes are redundant, others don’t get used, still others could be combined into a single index. By reducing the number of indexes, we can improve write performance in the database, and the size of the database itself. But we have to do it caref...| FLXSQL with Andy Levy
I will be presenting Answering the Auditor’s Call with Automation at two upcoming events, one virtual and one in-person. DBA Fundamentals Virtual User Group Tuesday, April 9 2024 at Noon EDT Capital Area SQL Server User Group on Monday, May 13th at 5:30 PM. As DBAs, we’re called on regularly to produce documentation for security & compliance audits. Being able to show who has what level of access to an instance is the minimum, but we’re often asked for more. Collecting this information ...| FLXSQL with Andy Levy
T-SQL Tuesday is a monthly blog party hosted by a different community member each month. I missed out on January 2024’s edition because I didn’t think I had anything good to talk about, but it suddenly hit me in February so…retroactive T-SQL Tuesday! For January 2024, Reitse Eskens (blog | twitter) prompts us to talk about our learnings from abandoned or failed projects. the main intent of this blog is to trigger your stories; what projects did you abandon but learn a lot from OR what...| FLXSQL with Andy Levy
The holidays have passed and it’s a new year. You probably have a gift card or two and haven’t decided how to use it yet. Allow me to help: Buy that fancy keyboard you’ve been coveting. Yes, the $100+ model. And get the good mouse/trackball while you’re at it. Just do it. If you’re reading this, you’re probably a “knowledge worker”, developer, data wrangler, or technical writer. You spend hours every day at your computer, hammering away at the keyboard. Why are you still using...| FLXSQL with Andy Levy
As PASS Summit approaches this week, I’m re-reviewing my evaluations from SQL Saturday Boston and I’d like to give feedback about feedback. Why Feedback? Both speakers and event organizers depend upon getting feedback about every session delivered at SQL Saturday, Data Saturday, PASS Summit, or any of the user groups (in-person or virtual). This feedback is valuable to speakers and event organizers alike. For speakers, it helps us understand if we’re doing OK when we’re in front of th...| FLXSQL with Andy Levy
All week, my phone has been reminding me (via photo memories) of the amazing experience I had at PASS Summit 2017. This can mean only one thing - PASS Summit 2023 is less than two weeks away! I’ve written a lot about Summit in the past and many of the posts I’ve written about getting ready are still applicable today, so go check those out too. Content and Scheduling As always PASS Summit is delivering a ton of amazing content - an embarrassment of riches! And the topics are getting more a...| FLXSQL with Andy Levy
First Things First Thank you to everyone who attended my session “Answering the Automator’s Call with Automation.” My slide deck and demo code are now available on my Github.. This was a new session and I’m pretty happy with how it worked out. I wasn’t sure if it would “land,” even after doing my run-throughs at home. Now that I’ve delivered the material to real people and had a conversation or two about it with folks, I’m feeling much more confident.| FLXSQL with Andy Levy
I’m happy to announce that I will be speaking at SQL Saturday Boston on October 14th, 2023. This year’s session is Answering the Auditor’s Call with Automation As DBAs, we’re called on regularly to produce documentation for security & compliance audits. Being able to show who has what level of access to an instance is the minimum, but we’re often asked for more. Collecting this information and compiling it into something usable by auditors could take you hours or even days. But with...| FLXSQL with Andy Levy
Last week I wrote about our FRC team, asking for support in in the form of a cheering section. Today, I’m asking for more assistance for these amazing students. Things went better than expected at the Finger Lakes Regional event and TAN[X] 3003 was part of the winning alliance. This means that we earned an invitation to the 2023 World Championships. You can watch all of our qualification and playoff matches via YouTube links on The Blue Alliance. They also appeared in a local news segment a...| FLXSQL with Andy Levy
For the past few years, I have been a mentor for FIRST Lego League and now FIRST Robotics Competition at our school. When I was in high school, I participated in some of the early seasons of FRC and now with the addition of FLL, my kids have gotten involved at an earlier age and really latched onto it. So of course, I talked myself into helping out with the program. And they’re stuck with me for a while; my son is a sophomore, and when he’s a senior, my daughter will be a freshman and she...| FLXSQL with Andy Levy
TL;DR: My home firewall/router is slow, please help me pick out a new one. After replacing my firewall/router/WiFi access point one too many times, I’m ready to get off the upgrade treadmill and buy something better than the consumer-grade gear sold at Staples.| FLXSQL with Andy Levy
T-SQL Tuesday is a monthly blog party hosted by a different community member each month, and this month Garry Bargsley (blog | twitter) wants to know what activities we undertake to wrap up the year. My ask is, what do you have planned for end-of-year activities for your SQL environment? Do you have annual processes or procedures you run? Do you clean up documentation? Do you just take time off and hope someone else does the work?| FLXSQL with Andy Levy
Fairly short post here. Due to the recent events around Twitter (which I will not get into), I’m making an effort to reduce or completely cease my activity on that platform. My Contact page has been updated with all of the below accounts/sites.| FLXSQL with Andy Levy
As I write this, it’s the weekend before PASS Data Community Summit 2022 and depending upon when I finish, it’ll post either shortly before SQL Saturday Oregon, or in time for folks to read it on SQLTrain en route to Seattle. Summit has snuck up on me this year and far more than any other year, I’m feeling woefully unprepared.| FLXSQL with Andy Levy
The Prompt In July, Brent Ozar (blog | twitter) asked us to make September Community Tools Awareness Month. In September, I want you to improve community knowledge about one free tool that you rely on every week in order to get your job done. I’m sure it will come as no surprise to readers of this blog, but I’m going to select the amazing PowerShell module dbatools. dbatools Is for Everyone Despite what the name may imply, dbatools is a valuable toolkit for anyone who needs to interact wi...| FLXSQL with Andy Levy
So Many Meetings I’ve said it. We’ve all said it. I can’t get any work done today, I’ve got so many meetings. I need to be reminded on occasion that for most of us, the meetings are work too. They are part of the job and we need to think of them as such. But I get it. I’m a technical professional. If you’re reading this blog, you probably are too. We feel “productive” when we’re actually putting fingers to keyboard, marker to whiteboard, “making stuff.” Being in meetings...| FLXSQL with Andy Levy
T-SQL Tuesday is a monthly blog party hosted by a different community member each month, and this month Kevin Kline (blog | twitter) asks us to talk about an IT conference that resulted in a major opportunity. Tell us the story of how attending an IT conference or event resulted in an amazing career or life opportunity. It will be a common refrain in this community, but I’m going to pick a PASS Summit. But not my first one.| FLXSQL with Andy Levy
T-SQL Tuesday is a monthly blog party hosted by a different community member each month, and this month Deborah Melkin (blog | twitter) asks us for a database-related rant. I don’t wanna go on a rant here… Who are we kidding? I like to rant. Here we go.| FLXSQL with Andy Levy
Note: I originally wrote this a few years ago but never posted it. It resurfaced when I migrated the blog so it’s being posted now. After watching Kevin Kline’s (blog | twitter) webinar Essential Tasks to a Successful Cloud Migration, I downloaded the T-SQL scripts to run them against some of my databases. One of the included queries identifies tables with forwarded fetches and right on top of the list was a table with over 1.6 billion forwarded fetches in the roughly 3 weeks since the in...| FLXSQL with Andy Levy
T-SQL Tuesday is a monthly blog party hosted by a different community member each month, and this month Kenneth Fisher (blog | twitter) asks us to talk about our first technical job.| FLXSQL with Andy Levy
Is this thing on? If you’re reading this test post, it means DNS has updated properly and I’ve successfully migrated to Azure Static Web Sites. Welcome!| FLXSQL with Andy Levy
Over the next couple days (weeks?), a significant change is coming to my blog (and if you’re reading this text, it’s already happened). I will be leaving Wordpress behind and my current hosting. Replacing it will be an all-new site hosted on Azure Static Sites, with the content written in Markdown and pages generated via the Hugo static site generator.| FLXSQL with Andy Levy
If you’d asked me 5 years ago if I would ever speak at Summit, I’d have said “no way, not possible.” I didn’t even think I was able to produce the kind of material that’s expected at an event on such a large scale. Not to mention having that many eyes on me. But times change. Experience, skills, and knowledge change. People change. And sometimes, people get talked into doing things things by their friends.| FLXSQL with Andy Levy
A collection of the resources mentioned in my PASS Data Community Summit session Backup Basics with PowerShell and dbatools, including bonus content!| FLXSQL with Andy Levy
Over the summer, I spent some (a lot of) time working on updates to a script at work which runs multiple processes in parallel. Everything seemed to work OK for a while, but then everything broke. It broke right around the time dbatools 1.1 dropped, so I started thinking that something must have changed there. As it turns out, it was entirely my fault and I hope this post will help you avoid the same trap.| FLXSQL with Andy Levy
Kind of a diversion into a Visual Studio Code/Azure Data Studio tip here (this works in both, as well as SQL Server Management Studio). I’m not a regular expression guru - far from it. I use them occasionally, but usually find myself fumbling around for a bit trying to figure out just the right expression to do what I need. I’ve known for a while that VSCode/ADS had regular expression matching built into its find/replace feature, but did you know you can also replace with it? It can help ...| FLXSQL with Andy Levy
I am thrilled to announce that I will be speaking at this year’s PASS Data Community Summit! This year’s event runs November 8th through 12th. I am thrilled to announce that I will be speaking at this year’s PASS Data Community Summit!| FLXSQL with Andy Levy
For years, I thought that native backups of databases using Transparent Data Encryption (TDE) couldn’t be compressed. Between TDE being limited to Enterprise Edition until SQL Server 2019 and my own lack of experience with TDE in prior positions, I hadn’t really experimented with this myself. Some people have even gone so far as to skip compression in their backup jobs for TDE-enabled databases because there’s no need to burn those CPU cycles if you won’t get any compression, right?| FLXSQL with Andy Levy
T-SQL Tuesday is a monthly blog party hosted by a different community member each month, and this month Brent Ozar (blog | twitter) asks us to talk about data types. Your mission: write a blog post about your favorite data type, and schedule it for next Tuesday, March 9. Mad about money? Feverish about float? Tell us what you use your favorite data type for, and what people need to know before they get started using it. Data types have so many interesting edge cases, like when Aaron Bertr...| FLXSQL with Andy Levy
I had a great time speaking at the Kansas City SQL Server User Group on Thursday, February 18th. The more I present my Backup Basics with PowerShell and dbatools session, the more I enjoy it. And each time, I’ve learned something new myself. In one of the demos I show how Restore-DbaDatabase selects and restores the most recent backup of a database when pointed at a directory holding several backups of a single database. Dan Maenle (twitter) asked how the function knows which one is the mos...| FLXSQL with Andy Levy
I will be presenting my session “Backup Basics with PowerShell and dbatools” this Thursday, February 18th at 2:30 PM Central Time at the Kansas City SQL Server User Group. I’m looking forward to getting this demo-rich session out in front more of folks to show how easy dbatools makes some of these common backup-related tasks. Come check it out! Or, if you’d like to see this or one of my other presentations at another user group meeting, please drop me a line!| FLXSQL with Andy Levy
While presenting Backup Basics with PowerShell and dbatools at ONDT, I mentioned a caveat with the -ReplaceExisting switch for Install-DbaMaintenanceSolution. This switch drops all of the objects installed by the Maintenance Solution, including the CommandLog table. If you use that table to produce evidence that the various maintenance tasks are being performed on a regular basis or use it to track performance of those tasks over time, dropping that table presents a problem.| FLXSQL with Andy Levy
I got a merge a while back that included a change I wasn’t expecting from one of my developers. All they were doing was renaming a column on a table. We had names settled a while ago. What’s up with that? Turns out, when I created the table, I named one of the fields BrithYear. This merge request corrected it to BirthYear. The misspelling slipped past me, past everyone else, it was only discovered because when this developer was building the a new query into their code, they spelled the f...| FLXSQL with Andy Levy
T-SQL Tuesday is a monthly blog party hosted by a different community blogger each month, and this month James McGillivray (blog | twitter) asks us about our views on vacations, escapes, or other breaks. --- I’d like to know about your own views on vacations, escapes or other breaks. Whether it’s work, technology, or any other situation that you need to get away from. Plans, memories, or relaxing activities, I want them all!| FLXSQL with Andy Levy
I had the honor of presenting a new session, Backup Basics with PowerShell and dbatools, at the first Ohio North Database Training meeting this evening. Thank you to the group leaders for the opportunity and to everyone who attended. Because this was both a brand new session and an attempt at a new way of delivering the presentation, I had a couple tech glitches but things went pretty well once they were understood and ironed out. Definitely room for improvement next time!| FLXSQL with Andy Levy
Yeah, so…that was a hell of a year, wasn’t it? Short-Form Reviews of Year 2020 Reviewer #1: 👎 Reviewer #2: ★✩✩✩✩, would not recommend Best Laid Plans… The year started out really well. I was getting into a good groove at the new job, I spoke at SQL Saturday Cleveland and SQL Saturday Rochester ran smoothly. My session for SQL Saturday Raleigh was accepted too, I submitted a session for SQL Saturday Albany, and I was invited to present remotely for SQL Professionals of Chatt...| FLXSQL with Andy Levy
Chrissy LeMaire (blog | twitter) pinged me earlier this week to tell me about Github Discussions. It’s a new feature of Github which is similar to Stack Exchange, but much more focused - it’s just for your project/repository! Get help, start discussions, share tips & tricks. She’s enabled this feature for the dbatools repository and it’s open for business. Go check it out and start posting questions, answers, or both!| FLXSQL with Andy Levy
PASS Summit 2020 has wrapped up (or is in the process of wrapping up), and as with years past, I’m getting this written while the experience is still fresh in my mind. This is also my long-form event evaluation. We’ve Moved! We’re Closed! The announcement that Summit 2020 was to be held in Houston brought was both disappointment and excitement. I enjoy visiting Seattle and have gotten to know little bits of it. I like the fall weather there. But it’s a long flight to get there and back.| FLXSQL with Andy Levy
This week is a double-whammy of activity - T-SQL Tuesday and PASS Summit 2020. T-SQL Tuesday is a monthly blog party hosted by a different community blogger each month, and this month Taiob Ali (blog | twitter) asks ushow we’re coping with the COVID-19 pandemic, 8 months in. --- 2020 is a unique year for all of us. We are living through a worldwide crisis that most of us have not seen or experienced. It has touched almost all aspects of our life. Depending on your location, social interacti...| FLXSQL with Andy Levy
A former colleague emailed me with a question about retaining/fixing database users and permissions after restoring a database. They were copying a database from one instance to another, with different logins, users, and permissions between the two instances. Backup & restore to copy the database is easy enough, but because users & permissions are kept inside the database itself, the destination environment loses all its permissions settings in the process. What to do?| FLXSQL with Andy Levy
I’ve been meaning to write something this post for a while but the stars have aligned this week. Garry Bargsley (blog | twitter) published a post about making a schema-only copy of a database on the day that I needed to solve that exact problem. But that’s not what this is about. It’s just a convenient way to demonstrate this shortcut. I’m sure that a lot of folks do work on the PowerShell command line, trying various things, before committing to writing a full script or function. Wor...| FLXSQL with Andy Levy
Recently I set up a new process to pull data out of a MySQL database and into SQL Server. Pretty standard ETL stuff, but it’s the organization’s first time moving data in this direction, so we had some extra work to do. After installing the SSIS package and the MySQL .NET connector in the development environment, we went through a few rounds of “why isn’t this working? why isn’t that working?” The last error gave probably the clearest indication of the root cause - the development...| FLXSQL with Andy Levy
A couple months ago I delivered a short (15 minute) presentation at work about the importance of having a good professional network and how I’d found mine. As I was developing it, I had to keep redirecting myself as the theme would start trending towards how great the #SQLFamily is. To be fair, that’s what inspired the topic in the first place, but 15 minutes of stories about my friends is not what my co-workers signed up for.| FLXSQL with Andy Levy
This weekend was SQL Saturday Albany 2020. This was my third time attending the Albany event, my second time presenting, and my first virtual SQL Saturday. As always, Ed & his team did a terrific job with organizing it. Communication for both attendees and speakers was excellent, and as far as I can tell, everything ran very smoothly. My Presentation I presented Keys to a Healthy Relationship with SQL Server in the 3:30 PM session block. I’ve uploaded my slides to the SQL Saturday site. Thi...| FLXSQL with Andy Levy
A little while back, I offered up a one-liner to scan your SQL Server instances and report which ones are out of date. But what if you need to take the next step, determining which updates need to be downloaded? That’s exactly what Josh asked on the SQL Community Slack recently. Can Test-DbaBuild also bring back the KB number? From reading the docs it looks possible as it does return the compliant version form the .json file, or at least I think it does 😀. The intention is if the KB is ...| FLXSQL with Andy Levy
Just because we aren’t all together in Houston doesn’t mean we can’t have a #SQLRun at this year’s Summit. It might even be easier for some folks as there’s no luggage space/weight limits, jet lag or a late night out on Tuesday. So here’s the deal. A while back, I created a SQLFamily group on Strava. If you’re not already a member of the group, no problem - anyone can join! You can even sync your activity from Garmin and some other platforms if you track things elsewhere.| FLXSQL with Andy Levy
Taking it back to SQL 101 today because I recently saw something that floored me. I’m a big fan of temp tables. I use ’em all over the place to stash intermediate results, break a dataset down into more manageable chunks, or even share them between procedures. And as it turns out, there’s more than one way to create them. The Traditional Way If you’re planning out your temp table usage, you’re probably creating them just like any other table, then populating them.| FLXSQL with Andy Levy
For the second consecutive year, I will be speaking at SQL Saturday Albany 2020 on July 25th, 2020. I will be presenting “Keys to a Healthy Relationship with SQL Server” at 3:30 PM. Abstract Developers and DBAs have had a long, sometimes strained relationship. Some developers see DBAs as roadblocks standing in the way of getting their work shipped; some DBAs see developers as agents of chaos bent on ruining their perfect database environments.| FLXSQL with Andy Levy
T-SQL Tuesday is a monthly blog party hosted by a different community blogger each month, and this month Kenneth Fisher (blog | twitter) asks usfor non-SQL tips & tricks. --- How about for this months TSQL Tuesday let’s do another month of tips and tricks. But just to be a bit different, nothing to do with SQL Server (in fact let’s say nothing related to a DBMS). No SSMS tricks, no T-SQL tips, something completely unrelated. For example did you know that, in Windows, if you grab a window ...| FLXSQL with Andy Levy
Setting up a home office can be a daunting task. Doubly so when you don’t get an opportunity to plan it out and you have to set things up with no warning and items on hand. Since starting to work from home on March 17th, my desk has been through 3 major versions. A word of warning: I struggle to keep a tidy desk, and I didn’t clean up before taking the pictures seen here.| FLXSQL with Andy Levy
It turns out I was doing this all wrong for months. For the longest time, I’ve been checking my SQL Server instances to see what needs patching with Test-DbaBuild from the dbatools PowerShell module. But the result was always the same - it never returned a Service Pack or Cumulative Update target. I glossed over it because I knew what the right answer was already, but recently I decided that wasn’t good enough. We need a reliable report to give to other people.| FLXSQL with Andy Levy
We’re at least five weeks into this thing here in New York and while there are some encouraging signs, it’s more likely than not that “non-essential” workers aren’t at the halfway point yet. I’m preparing myself for a few more months, both mentally and in terms of my workspace. Here are a few resources that might help you as you settle into doing this long-term. Written Scott Hanselman’s Remote Work blog category. Scott has been a remote employee at Microsoft for over a decade, ...| FLXSQL with Andy Levy
A little while ago, Ray Kim (blog | twitter) asked a few folks who organize SQL Saturday events a few questions for his blog. The results are in and he’s compiled them all into one big post. Check it out: What goes into organizing a #SQLSaturday? From the words of #SQLFamily| FLXSQL with Andy Levy
Settle in folks, this is a long, rambling post. As this goes live, it’s been about three weeks since my abrupt switch from driving to the office every day to working from home full-time. This shift happened at the same time my kids had school cancelled, and our lives got flipped, turned upside down. So I’d like to take a minute, just sit right there, and I’ll tell you how I…am dealing with all this.| FLXSQL with Andy Levy
This tripped me up a few weeks ago, but once I stopped and thought about for a moment it made total sense. I was trying to copy some data into a temp table and got an error I’d never encountered before. Column, parameter, or variable #1: Cannot find data type MyStringType. What’s that all about? Let’s find out. Why User-Defined Types? I’ve never been a fan of user-defined types (UDT). They definitely have applications, but there’s also a temptation to use them to “standar...| FLXSQL with Andy Levy
This is one of several posts on modernizing T-SQL code with new features and functionality available in SQL Server. Last year, you finally retired the last of your SQL Server 2008R2 instances. Congratulations! But are you taking advantage of everything that your new instances have to offer? Unless you did a review of all of the T-SQL in your applications, I’m guessing not. This one seems pretty basic, but it’s got a trick up its sleeve - the TRIM() function.| FLXSQL with Andy Levy
T-SQL Tuesday is a monthly blog party hosted by a different community blogger each month, and this month Tracy Boggiano (blog | twitter) asks us to talk about Query Store, whether we’re using it or not. --- For this T-SQL Tuesday, write about your experience adopting Query Store, maybe something unique you have seen, or a how your configure you databases, or any customization you done around it, or a story about how it saved the day. Alternately, if you have not implemented yet blog about...| FLXSQL with Andy Levy
This is one of several posts on modernizing T-SQL code with new features and functionality available in SQL Server. Last year, you finally retired the last of your SQL Server 2008R2 instances. Congratulations! But are you taking advantage of everything that your new instances have to offer? Unless you did a review of all of the T-SQL in your applications, I’m guessing not. Let’s take a look at the SEQUENCE object, introduced with SQL Server 2012.| FLXSQL with Andy Levy
Last week (as I write this), Kevin Hill (blog | twitter) released the first episode of his new podcast Data Bits. I enjoyed listening to it and said “hey bud, if you need a guest sometime down the line, give me a shout!” Well, “sometime down the line” turned out to be just a few days, and we recorded on the evening of March 4th amid a little craziness in both our houses. I always enjoy catching up with Kevin and our hour-long conversation could easily have been three or four. We talke...| FLXSQL with Andy Levy
Another SQL Saturday Rochester is in the books - our eighth over the past nine years. Unlike past years, I actually am going to recap the event! Ray Kim (blog | twitter) beat me to the punch with his own recap post, but that’s to be expected - he’s a much faster writer than I! February? Really? I got some interesting reactions when I started telling people we’d have SQL Saturday in February this year. Rochester isn’t exactly known for its hospitable winter weather (unless you’re int...| FLXSQL with Andy Levy
dbatools has a lot of functions. A lot. Over 550. There is a great command index on the website, and the documentation gets updated every time a new version is published. But sometimes, it feels like you can’t find what you need unless you already know the name of the thing you’re looking for. Other times, you might start writing your own wrapper around dbatools functions, or maybe start a new function from scratch, because it seems like the functionality you need isn’t there.| FLXSQL with Andy Levy
This is another in a group of several posts on modernizing T-SQL code with new features and functionality available in SQL Server. SQL Server 2016 gave us the STRING_SPLIT() function, but what about the reverse - compiling a set of values into one delimited string? We only had to wait 15 months for the release of SQL Server 2017, and the STRING_AGG() function. Setup For this post, I’m using the set of North American telephone area codes sourced from the North American Numbering Plan Adminis...| FLXSQL with Andy Levy
This month, Jess Pomfret (blog | twitter) is trying to beat the winter motivation slump by exploring, and asking us to share, our lifehacks that make daily life a little easier. --- So here we are, the first Tuesday of February. I personally always find February to be the month where my motivation is a little low. I live in the northern hemisphere so it can be a pretty dreary winter month where it still feels like there is a long way to spring (I will say this January I moved from Ohio back t...| FLXSQL with Andy Levy
This is the first of several posts on modernizing T-SQL code with new features and functionality available in SQL Server. Last year, you finally retired the last of your SQL Server 2008R2 instances. Congratulations! But are you taking advantage of everything that your new instances have to offer? Unless you did a review of all of the T-SQL in your applications, I’m guessing not. At one time or another, we all find ourselves having to do some string parsing, especially splitting strings on a...| FLXSQL with Andy Levy
Thank you to everyone who came out to see my presentation Keys to a Healthy Relationship with SQL Server at SQL Saturday Cleveland. I had a great time and I hope each of you learned at least one new thing. Here are the links I mentioned in the session, as well as a couple that contributed to some of the things I mentioned. Slide deck uploaded to the SQL Saturday website Emoji as server object names Michael J. Swart’s (blog | twitter) Ten Percent Rule Telling Entity Framework to select speci...| FLXSQL with Andy Levy
A few years ago, I wrote about my first experiencespeaking at SQL Saturday. Recently I had a conversation with one of our first-timers speaking at SQL Saturday Rochester 2020 and realized I should do a follow-up with some additional tips. Use the FAQ Did you know that PASS has an FAQ section for speakers on the SQL Saturday site? But don’t limit yourself to that - look through the whole FAQ, you might get some new insights into SQL Saturday.| FLXSQL with Andy Levy
Kicking off T-SQL Tuesday for 2020, Jon Shaulis (blog | twitter) challenges us to talk about imposter syndrome: --- I want to read your stories about when you’ve experienced, seen, or overcome imposter syndrome! Was there a job that you felt you were ill-prepared for? Did you make a mistake or did someone say something that made you question if you were a true data professional? Maybe there was a particular task you ran into that made you question your experience? Did you resolve your tasks...| FLXSQL with Andy Levy
I presented a few times in 2019, and I’m starting off 2020 with several as well. Here’s what’s on the schedule for Q1. 2020-01-06 Yep, ISO8601 format. That’s how I roll. - I’ll be giving a lightning talk at work titled “What Does a Database Administrator Do, Anyway?” This one isn’t open to the general public (though I might tweak it for use at community events), but The Bobs and “It Depends” both make an appearance in the deck. 2020-02-01 - I’m thrilled to announce that ...| FLXSQL with Andy Levy
As we open 2020 (and the house is still quiet on this New Year’s Morning), I thought I’d take a moment to reflect on the past year. Blogging 2019 was another good year here. I published 32 posts totaling over 21,000 words! What really amazes me is that a post from 2018 is consistently one of the most popular ones. I must have done a really good job on the SEO with that one.| FLXSQL with Andy Levy
Closing out 2019’s T-SQL Tuesday, Mala (blog | twitter) is asking us to reflect on the past twelve months: --- This is a time for material gift giving, for many of us. It might also be a time to consider the many gifts we have received through the year, and perhaps use this opportunity to appreciate people or situations that we were blessed with. So my question would be – what are a few things would you consider as gifts, and why?| FLXSQL with Andy Levy
I took a bunch of photos at and around Summit this year, including more selfies than in years past - I’m getting better about it! For a few more photos, check out my earlier Summit Photowalk post.| FLXSQL with Andy Levy
This was my first year joining the Summit Photowalk organized by Jamie Wick (blog | twitter). I had a lot of fun - Seattle is full of great photo opportunities and it’s a pretty low-key way to hang out and chat with people in a smaller group. We started at the convention center, then walked down to Pike’s Market. From there it was on to the waterfront, then back up Seneca Street.| FLXSQL with Andy Levy
I’m home from PASS Summit 2019, recovered from the travel, and in the post-Summit “I miss #SQLFamily” funk. Time to recap the week, maybe a bit differently than it’s been done in the past (at least by me). Not going to get too far into the technical stuff because what was thrown at us was a bit overwhelming, and it’ll take a while for it to all soak in. I’m going to tell the story of my Summit 2019 experience through shoutouts to the folks I connected and reconnected with. Let’s...| FLXSQL with Andy Levy
Or: Andy Authors An Amazing Alliteration Do enough work with PowerShell and you’ll build up a decent collection of modules installed from the gallery into either your computer or your user profile (or maybe both!). Here are two one-liners to help keep things up to date and tidy. Note:I’m calling these one-liners but I’ve inserted line breaks for readability here. These do count as one-liners as each one is a single, unbroken PowerShell pipeline.| FLXSQL with Andy Levy
We have just published SQL Saturday Rochester 2020. We took last year off but we’re back for 2020 on a very special day - it’s Leap Day, February 29th! What is SQL Saturday? PASS SQL Saturday is a free training event for professionals who use the Microsoft data platform. These community events offer content across data management, cloud and hybrid architechture, analytics, AI, and more. What Else is SQL Saturday? SQL Saturday is also:| FLXSQL with Andy Levy
This is the final installment in my series of posts which I hope will help you (and me!) prepare for the upcoming PASS Summit November 4-8, 2019 in Seattle, Washington. Find Me! Summit is only a week away now and I’m hoping to reconnect with friends and meet new folks. I will be all over the place all week - just look for the hat or ping me on Twitter or the SQL Community Slack at @ALevyInROC! A few things that are definitely set:| FLXSQL with Andy Levy
This is the third in my series of posts which I hope will help you (and me!) prepare for the upcoming PASS Summit November 4-8, 2019 in Seattle, Washington. So Many Sessions! Summit 2019 is offering 234 regular sessions Wednesday through Friday plus 21 pre-con sessions on Monday and TuesdayYou’ve hopefully selected these already. It’s an embarrassment of riches and you can very easily get stuck trying to figure out which sessions to attend.| FLXSQL with Andy Levy
This is my second post in a series which I hope will help you (and me!) prepare for the upcoming PASS Summit November 4-8, 2019 in Seattle, Washington. Networking, Networking! Where the Real Benefits From Summit Are Realized One of if not the most valuable parts of PASS Summit is the networking opportunities. People keep talk about it everywhere. Network, network, network. Usually it’s in the context of finding jobs but this is an important skill to have even if you’re not going anywhere!| FLXSQL with Andy Levy
For T-SQL Tuesday this month, Alex Yates (blog | twitter) gives us this challenge: --- I would like you to write about something in your IT career that you have changed your mind about. What was your original opinion? Why did you believe that? What do you believe now? Why did you change your mind? You are welcome to discuss technical or non-technical topics. Feel free to go as deeply technical or as personal and human as you like. Brain-melting technical posts about the inner workings of the ...| FLXSQL with Andy Levy
It’s time once again to prepare ourselves for the endurance test that is PASS Summit, November 5-8. I’ve participated in the Summit Buddies program the past two years, but am taking this year off from it. Instead, I’m collecting information I’ve sent to to my buddies ahead of past Summits and posting it here on my blog, in hopes that it helps folks out. This is going to be broken down into a couple posts.| FLXSQL with Andy Levy
I’ve found myself traveling quite a bit this year, with more travel on the horizon. Like many, I travel with a fair bit of technology and of course that means keeping things charged - both on the go and at rest. And, like a lot of folks, before every trip I found myself running around the house collecting cords, chargers and adapters to toss into a Ziplock bag. Then unpacking and returning them to their correct places when I got home. It works, but what a pain!| FLXSQL with Andy Levy
It’s early September, which means it’s time for T-SQL Tuesday! This month’s topic comes from Kevin Chant (blog | twitter). Our mission, should we choose to accept it (click the image to see the original invite): --- Recently I’ve had to submit suggestions to Microsoft about Azure DevOps and SQL Server. I will admit a couple of the suggestions had certainly been in my head for a while. In fact, I wish I had suggested them sooner.| FLXSQL with Andy Levy
This is Part 3 in a three-part series. Please see Part 1 and Part 2 for more. What does your average day look like? I’m going to punt to my “A Day in the Life” series here. When you started, did you know what your position was going to look like 1 month, 6 months, 1 year, 5 years from then? How accurate has that been so far? I’ve only been at my current job for about 2 1/2 years, but I can speak to the shorter intervals. I’m going to be intentionally vague in spots here as I don’t...| FLXSQL with Andy Levy
Answering T-SQL Tuesday 174, your favorite interview question| flxsql.com