T-SQL Tuesday – measure twice, cut once

Data Thoughts – T-SQL Tuesday #148 – Advice on running a user group

G’day,

This months T-SQL Tuesday (March 2022) invite is brought to you by Rie Merrit – @IrishSQL

Rie has asked us to write about “Advice on running a user group“

It’s a great topic, and if you’ve even been involved in a user group in any capacity then you’ll probably appreciate that it takes a fair bit of ingenuity, knowledge, connections, manners, begging, borrowing and getting help from others to eventually become a successful group.

The first thing to note is that you don’t necessarily need all of those things to start off with – but manners and the ability to persuade others to help will certainly be a great start.

And, with a few of those things in hand, “The Christchurch SQL Server User Group” was founded, run by myself, Rob Douglas [@rob_douglasNZ] and Nick Draper. Fortunately, Rob’s company lent us their office space, on the condition we tidied up after ourselves, a reasonable request although I never envisaged carrying so may beer bottles and pizza boxes to the bin. I soon learnt moving the bin closer to the attendees was a good idea.

The group was mainly founded around socially events. Christchurch is a small(ish) place and we managed to get the word out pretty well – it wasn’t uncommon to have 20-30 people turn up even in the early days. We usually carried on the meeting in a local pub afterwards.

Soon we were contributing to other local events – such as the annual Christchurch Code Camp (thanks for the opportunity Steve Knutson (@nztechtweet)) and we managed to get a SQL Saturday off the ground after Greg Low (@greglow) helped us get affiliated to PASS. The more community involvement, the better – but the local population is the life blood of your group. While national and international are great and interesting, local is what’s going to build your group (at least where physical meetings are involved, that may be shifting with virtual) – think local, act global (remember, every local community has some sort of individualism and uniqueness that you can probably leverage somehow)

We then managed to make another community connection with the local community college, which was quite fortunate as Rob was moving away from the city and the group needed a new home – so Ara stepped up and stepped in. The deal was the same, tidy up after yourself. This actually proved a little more challenging as they didn’t have big bins and the now growing amount of pizza boxes wouldn’t fit. So, I needed to transport all the rubbish home myself – so I put rubbish bags on my (now growing) group night shopping list,

The group’s still based at Ara, and I know that members of the group (including myself) still do education sessions for their students from time-to-time. A mutually beneficial arrangement.

So, what did I learn. Well, you need to change as your audience changes. Initially, I knew nearly all of the members and I assumed they all liked the food and drink on offer – beer and pizza – and they did. But I should have been more accommodating as new members joined, catering more for people who didn’t want to drink beer or eat pizza.

I left Christchurch in early 2016, the group had grown significantly and it was time to hand it over. One of our ever present members, Hamish Watson (@TheHybridDBA) took it over, and it’s gone from strength to strength ever since. Most members are keen to get involved in any capacity, while speaking may seem the obvious one – that’s not for everyone. Simply having your regular members help to make new members feel welcome and involved will go a long way.

Since leaving Christchurch, I’ve been involved in a few other groups. “SQL Social Melbourne” run by Martin Cairney (@martin_cairney) is a great concept. Built around a social gathering in a local pub it encourages short talks from various members and it was a great way of getting new speakers interested in the local / national / international communities. Unfortunatly, the pandemic has curtailed that – at least temporarily, but I reckon we’ll see it make a comeback soon. If you’re in Melbourne, keep your eye out.

More recently, I moved to Brisbane and became involved in Virtual user groups with Warwick Rudd (@Warwick_Rudd), We run Data Platform Down Under which runs at 12:15pm AEST (UTC+10) on a Tuesday, usually the first Tuesday of the month, but this can vary and we often have additional sessions (still on a Tuesday). Check out our times. They are great for most parts of the world (although maybe not Europe – sorry Europe!)

Data Platform Downunder – worldwide meeting times (always Tuesdays)

Which brings me to another point – “Never turn down the opportunity of free publicity for your group”

And with that, I’ll say that Thanks Rie, and to everybody reading this, best of luck with all your user groups -whether you’re a current group host, a future group host or a valued (or prospective) community member.

Have a great day

Cheers

Marty.

Data Thoughts – T-SQL Tuesday #147 – Upgrade Strategies

G’day,

This months T-SQL Tuesday (January 2022) invite is brought to you by Steve Jones – @way0utwest

Steve’s asked us to write about “Planning for upgrades“

In the not too recent past, I’ve done quite a lot of migrations to Azure SQL Managed Instance, so, I thought about writing about that. But that seems more of an ‘uplift’ than an upgrade. I guess that’s an arguable point – depending on your perspective.

Anyway, just recently, I upgrades a SQL 2008 instance to SQL 2019. Quite straight forward I thought. And it was. But I ran into some unexpected events along the way that I thought might make an interesting post.

One of the first things that I like to do is talk to the person who wants the job doing – the client 🙂

I like to find out their motivations and reasons for doing an upgrade, which would seems obvious in this case as SQL 2008 is out of extended support. This was a fully on-premises upgrade, but I also like to check facts.

There were a number of servers to upgrade, as you might expect – DEV, TEST , UAT and PROD.

Interestingly enough the server in the TEST environment had previously been upgraded to SQL 2016 with the user databases left in 2008 compatibility mode. Circumstances like this are always intriguing, and a few questions spring to mind such as why only one environment was tackled, why it was left and how this affects any code that makes it way though the various environments and eventually lands in the PROD environment.

Anyway, that aside, one of things I like to reference is Compatibility Certification – in recent years Microsoft has started to improve guidance and make certain guarantees around SQL Server upgrades, helping organisations to better manage risk.

It’s not a short article, but also not the longest one that you’ll come across. If you’re doing upgrades regularly (or even if you are not) then I’d bookmark it as the word certification and compliance will most likely lead search engines down other routes.

After investigating the environments, I’d normal put a plan together of how the environments will each be upgraded and the testing that will be done, both by you and by the client. I’d be keen to know their Change Advisory Board (CAB) processes and a rough indication of how long this would take.

Oh, and is this an in-place upgrade or a side-by-side upgrade (which some might refer to as a migration). In this case it was an in-place upgrade. There’s pros and cons to both and it depends on many factors such as risk, downtime and complexity – to name just a few.

I always favour downloading and running Database Migration Assistant (DMA).

DMA works fine for on-premises migrations / upgrades, it’s not just for the cloud. DMA produces both JSON and XLXS files that list out issues. I’ve seen a few open source solutions that pull the results into a data warehouse and then use a Power BI solution to visual represent any issues. Microsoft used to have one, but it seems to have disappeared at the moment (please let me know if you see it)

Then there’s the issues of upgrading instances that are out-of-support. You might require a ‘double hop” – basically where there are multiple upgrades involved, for instance upgrade to 2016 then upgrade to 2019.

It’s all fun and games till somebody loses an eye 🙂 – so plan well.

Sometimes simply upgrades turn out to be way more time consuming and problematic than you imagine.

Take care out there.

Have a great day.

Cheers

Martin.

Upending Preconceived Notions

This months T-SQL Tuesday (January 2022) invite is brought to you by Andy Yun – @sqlbek.

Andy’s asked us to write about preconceived notions.

Anyway, before I put pen to paper (so to be speak) – or more accurately fingers to keyboard, I decided to have a look around the web at the definitions for “Preconceived Notions” – I like this one,

“a personal belief or judgment that is not founded on proof or certainty”

And my problem for at least the early part of career was that I was too willing to take the word of other people at face value, even when I suspected they weren’t correct rather than debating with them. I guess I had the preconceived notion that others preconceived notions (that often they were quite happy to tell anybody who cared to listen about) were correct.

Here’s an example, somebody once told me ‘All cursors are bad, never write one’ – and then their preconceive notion became mine (unfortunately)

Now, I soon found that cursors did have there uses, maybe not as a standard approach in production, but certainly to help me ‘write code , that writes code’.

I used them for things like, generating comma separated lists for select statements that I’d pulled from INFORATION_SCHEMA views.

I used then to create multiple DDL statements and cycle through a list, executing individual statements programmatically- usually just on my local dev machine.

Most of this type of thing I can now do with other concepts, such as XML for generating CSV lists or window functions for retrieving values from rows other than the current one.

While my use of cursors has probably subsided over the years, I still use them – but mainly when I’m developing to ‘write code, that writes code’

The moral of story – I think – is avoid letting other peoples reconceived notions become your preconceived notions, that how myths start and are continue.

I soon learned my lesson to question everything, the world revolves around people – or is it data? – but that’s just an expression, or is it yet another preconceived notion 🙂

Have a great day.

Cheers

Martin.