markw.dev - the blog

Another first for the blog, a response to another post.

As technologists most of us have a deep curiosity and interest in technology and how it is applied in the world.

This was a hard one to get through honestly.

Holy crap, first I am doing book reviews and now I have an AI tag on the blog, what is happening here?!

First off...

Life is full of "absolutes".

I haven't written a blog post (here) in over 5 years, so what better time to start things back up than a T-SQL Tuesday?

In a previous post I discussed runspaces and instances and explained some of the components involved.

This post is part of T-SQL Tuesday.

Hey folks!

Hey folks!

Anyone who knows me knows how cheap I am, especially when it comes to paying for services I feel I can run myself.

Recently Jess Pomfret (b|t) wrote a post on executing a folder of SQL scripts against a SQL Server instance.

In a recent blog post Andrew Pruski (b|t) shared a presentation setup he put together using Github Pages and reveal.js.

In this post I'll discuss a bug we found in SQL Server in our staging environment.

As 2020 comes to a close I had a desire to write a blog post about all the things and feelings I've had over this year.

EightKB in July 2020 was a shocking success with over 1,000 concurrent attendees at our peak!

Sometimes I get frustrated with how something is done and I put my head down and get to work.

Fully automated hands-off PowerShell scripts can be extermely useful for the DBA or System Administrator, but what if you need to get input from the user, or maybe you want to implement a menu system?

Today's post is a quick one.

My last post was from before the world exploded.

I'm excited and a little scared to announce that (with the help of some friends) I'm helping launch my first conference!

This post is a part of the SQL Server community's T-SQL Tuesday event.

This post is inspired by an odd situation I ran into in a project I'm working on.

While I am admittedly a home body, I do get out every once in a while and present at conferences (mostly SQL Saturday events), but this year I have two exciting opportunities that will allow me to branch out a bit. sql server Data Céilí I'm honored to have

PowerShell runspaces are a great, if often confusing, feature of PowerShell.

The "Classes" feature in PowerShell v5+ can be super useful, but what happens if you need class-like functionality but are forced to use an older version of PowerShell?

Hello friends, welcome to the new blog!

Expanding on the hello world script we have been looking at in previous posts, we will add some intelligence to our greeting using conditional logic.

When you get a group of bloggers together it's inevitable that they'll start talking about the software they use to run their blog.

In the last post we talked a little about what Bash is and ended with a simple "Hello World" example.

This isn't my usual post, but I wanted to tell people about a few cool projects I have been involved with recently that might interest some people.

You're comfortable with PowerShell and you've honed your T-SQL skills over the years, but what about the Bash scripting language?

Lots of people have used the OUTPUT clause in an INSERT/UPDATE/DELETE statement, but many may not know just how flexible it is, and what hidden gems there are in the documentation.

As a DBA I use PowerShell every day.

Hopefully you don't experience a lot of job failures.

We typically think of error logs as somewhere to go to find issues, but what if your error logs ARE the issue?

Everyone loves the temporary table. temporary tables can be very useful when trying to execute complex operations, or get around optimizer quirks.

When Resource Governor was first introduced with SQL Server 2008 you could use it to put limits on CPU usage, memory usage, and concurrent requests.

I'm still here.

As a DBA your most important job is making sure you don't lose your data in the case of catastrophic failure.

Before we dive into some extended events and PowerShell fun I want to say thanks to Jes Borland (WWW/Twitter) for hosting this months T-SQL Tuesday!

When you notice a performance issue on an instance, what is your first instinct?

There's a lot to be said for readability in code.

If you've done any amount of SQL development, you've probably seen an EXISTS clause.

Mark Wilkinson, a budding DBA in Raleigh North Carolina, is looking for a skilled mentor to help him shape his future.

DBCC SHOW_STATISTICS While it may not be fun, running DBCC SHOW_STATISTICS can tell you a lot about how the query optimizer might use a given index, or why certain queries are more susceptible to parameter sniffing.

Recently I had the privilege of speaking at PASS SQL Saturday #292 in Detroit; I presented a session on the importance of monitoring: What Just Happened?.