The Pros and Cons of Virtual Conferences: Just My Opinions (DBW 2020-07-04)

Managing Stress

This has been a stressful time for many people around the world. Working remotely, limited movement, pressure to continue to perform while perhaps being worried about continued employment, these and many more factors have made the last few months hard for many people around the world.

I interviewed Troy Hunt earlier this week for Redgate Streamed and in the introduction, made a joke about his achievements, including being a father and husband. He published a post about stress the next day, revealing that his home life had been difficult last year and he had to rebuild it. I felt bad and sent an apology, because I know how hard difficulties in life can be and the stress they create. It's also good to apologize to anyone you might have hurt, regardless of intent.

His method of rebuilding was based on friendships, being careful in his decision making, focus on goals and letting other things go, finding a way to unwind (a beer), and taking care of his health. I think those are great things, though driving forward with focus is something I find many people struggling with. Of course, that's why most people aren't Troy Hunt and extremely successful in their finances and career.

It's OK to not aim for what society thinks is important. Owning a company or making millions. It's OK to aim for simpler goals, but it is helpful to try to drive yourself towards something you are interested in. A friend went back to school and is struggling a bit this summer with work. There are few jobs and very few internships. Instead of getting too upset, this person checked their finances and decided they could get by with minimal work and has tried to spend some time working on learning a language. Not for school, or with a purpose, other than interest as a hobby.

It is important to have some way to relax and enjoy yourself with a hobby, with faith, with fun times with loved ones. Getting away from stress is important, however you may choose to do it. I'd also say that while goals are good and measuring them helps your career, for many of us, a break away from work should be just that. If you have a project or some thing you want to work on, just enjoy the time, whether you move forward or not. The journey sometimes is the best part, and the hopefully the part that helps you relieve some stress.

Steve Jones - SSC Editor

Join the debate, and respond to the editorial on the forums

SQL Change Automation makes automation simple enough that it can adapt to suit many different approaches to SQL Server database development. Phil Factor describes a project to update the Pubs database, using it in combination with a PowerShell function and to maintain in source control the build scripts, migration scripts and object-level scripts, for every version of the database.

How well do the SQL Server licenses you own match up with what you need for your current use? William Durkin explains how to use SQL Monitor to find out.

Phil Factor on the fill factor, pages splits and index fragmentation, and how SQL Monitor can help you decide if a custom fill factor for certain indexes might help alleviate performance issues.

On a week long theme on XML and JSON in SQL Server, this is the second post. After the first post of just showing how to store these values...

I wanted to cover something which has bitten me in two separate ways regarding SQL Server Machine Learning Services and Resource Governor. Resource Governor and Default Memory If you...

I was working on a couple of Azure databases the o...

What is Azure SQL Database Serverless? When I hear the term serverless my mind gets confused. How can a database exist without a server? Azure is a cloud platform,... The...

Presently sponsored by: Make bad passwords history with safepass.me. Installs in 5 minutes. Protects forever. I started writing this blog post alone in a hotel room in Budapest last September....

At a Redgate Summit in May, I gave a 20-minute presentation on the challenges of working from home. I presented on the topic, because, unlike many people, I’ve been...

I need to write something more on this, but it str...

Before taking any time with the rest of my SQL Saturday Chattanooga, Home Edition teammates to discuss what went right and wrong with our event (it felt mostly right, honestly...

Whoo! It’s been six months since my last post. There are reasons for this, none of which are probably valid, but it’s the way it is. I’ve been a...

Introduction Jennifer Stirrup is a data strategist and technologist, Microsoft Data Platform Most Valuable Professional (MVP), Microsoft Regional Director, Microsoft Certified Trainer, founder of Data Relish Ltd, diversity and... The...

The formal announcement is here (Announcement). What does this mean to you? This means that you will have 1 on 1 time with Microsoft Engineers and highly sought after...

PASS is an organization that has helped my career at many levels. I’ve served as a user group leader, a SQL Saturday organizer, a regional mentor, and spoken at...

As you know, I spoke to 12 Chapter Leaders and 4 Regional Mentors yesterday. All are very upset with PASS right now and feel slighted, which as a volunteer...

Dear Vendors that encrypt stored procedures in SQL Server, Stop It! We were having a discussion on Twitter about vendors encrypting stored procedures recently, and this justification came up...

One of the things I love the most about Platform a...

It sounds like a trick question, but I’m serious. If your company’s management is just now starting to consider the cloud in 2020, your reaction shouldn’t be to cast...

Monitoring should be able to happen no matter where you are located. This year organizations around the globe had to adapt to many new challenges including a distributed workforce and managing their estate when they can’t be in the office. This blog outlines the reasons and benefits of adopting remote monitoring.

Free Webinar: Enable your organization to increase efficiency, reduce errors and get the most from your customer infrastructures with Database DevOps and Octopus Deploy. Wednesday July 15th & Friday July 17th. If you can't join us live, register to receive the recording.

My Pluralsight course for new SQL Server DBAs (Needs to upgrade to a bigger bowl) Common scenario: Company is using SQL Server Express to save on licensing costs... The...

Missing Persons If you missed out on my online class, I’m offering two more dates for it in July. You can catch all the goodness of Premium Performance Tuning on July...

Missing Persons If you missed out on my online class, I’m offering two more dates for it in July. You can catch all the goodness of Premium Performance Tuning on July...

I’m excited to begin moving over courses from SQ...

Click here to learn more about Anas Baig. The Cali...

Have you ever had the experience of learning a new and better way to do something, gotten excited about applying it to your own work, eagerly showed a new-and-improved...

In the second article of this series, Edward Pollack demonstrates some ways to design and populate a columnstore index to get even better performance.

In the second article of this series, Uwe Ricken discusses ways to affect the performance of queries involving heaps, including the TOP operator, compression, and partitioning.

This week I attended the Virtual DevOps Enterprise Summit. As a sponsor, Redgate held a virtual Happy Hour event in which we chatted with a great group of folks...

Struggling with #ADF deployment? adf_publish b...

In this video, Andy Leonard discusses and demonstrates the Azure Data Factory ForEach activity. The post Recording – Using the Azure Data Factory ForEach Activity appeared first on AndyLeonard.blog().

Code Project Overview This open source code project delivers a simple metadata driven processing framework for Azure Data Factory (ADF). The framework is made possible by coupling ADF with...

Subtitle: SHAME ON YOU MICROSOFT! This is not a new behavior. It’s not a new risk. It’s the same old risk that’s been in Windows Failover Clustering for quite...

For the past eighteen months, Intel has paraded it...

It’s a step down from the W5700X in almost every way—including price.

One of the two leading manufacturers of tape cartridge storage, FujiFilm, claims that they have a technology roadmap through to 2031 which builds on the current magnetic tape paradigm...

Samsung's second-generation QLC NAND is here, but it's still held back by a SATA interface. The new Samsung 870 QVO is probably big enough to be your only SSD,...

I was helping a client this past week to calculate the total business hours between a start date/time and an end date/time, taking into account the working days, public...

Microsoft designed its retail stores to be cool li...

Microsoft is readying a new learning app -- a preview of which is coming later this year -- that will be part of its Teams service. It will help...

Thanks for coming today. I apologize for baiting you in here with a picture of toilet paper. That’s not even in the US – that’s from my Iceland trip,...

During my parameter sniffing classes, people get a little exasperated with the complexity of the problem. Parameter sniffing is totally hard. I get it. At some level, it’d be...

Let’s start with STATISTICS TIME output from a query: How many cores is it using? 124ms of cpu over 42ms… = an average of 2.95 cores per second. Now...

Working On It I’ve been re-working a lot of the demos in a presentation that I’m working on called Index Internals That Matter For Performance, because after a first walk...

Join us live as we answer your questions about Pow...

Not sure what Row-Level Security (RLS) is in Power...

Jamie Wallis explains how SQL Monitor can both reveal quickly who ran a deployment, and when, and automate the incident-response workflow to ensure it's dealt with swiftly. By extending...

I used to make fun of YAML because I was scared of...

Let's say your QA team maintain two similar test databases. They run tests to verify that different versions of the same application still produce the same, correct results. Therefore,...

We have released version 1.0 of the Cosmos DB Profiler. You can now use it from inside Azure Function and profiler production systems remotely. I have wrote an article...

Presently sponsored by: Make bad passwords history with safepass.me. Installs in 5 minutes. Protects forever. Today, almost one year after the release of version 5, I'm happy to release the...

Over the years I have created a number of SQL Serv...

Over the years I have created a number of SQL Serv...

No, not that kind of volume! Over the past couple ...

iOS apps are repeatedly reading clipboard data, which can include all sorts of sensitive information. While Haj Bakry and Mysk published their research in March, the invasive apps made...

In this article, Diogo Souza explains GitFlow, a b...

I believe that language matters, and that it is wo...

In 1996 John Perry Barlow, cofounder of internet rights group the Electronic Frontier Foundation, wrote “A declaration of the independence of cyberspace.” It begins: “Governments of the Industrial World,...

Solving real-world problems is different than answering interview questions or twitter polls. The biggest difference is that real problems aren’t always fair. There’s not always a right answer. Answer...

In today’s business environment, strategic technology initiatives are driven by the need to grow with greater agility and adapt to rapidly changing commercial, environmental, and regulatory conditions. A new...

BMW says it's a way to try before you buy, but do people want an extra monthly fee?

When I’m doing a webcast, the same question alwa...

For the past few months most of the world has been...

SpaceX’s 11 launches match the total this year by Russia, Europe, and Japan combined.

Visual Code is extremely popular product. It is a multi-platform application and you can add all types of extensions to make it work for your needs. Also,...

Diagnostic Queries Glenn Berry has long been known for producing the definitive diagnostic query set for various SQL Server versions. Between his amazing work and my favorite Brent Ozar First... The...

Since SQL Server is supported in containers, you can now run a SQL Server instance in your macOS without dual-booting or running a virtual machine. In this article of the series, Carlos Robles demonstrates how to connect to the SQL Server once it’s running.

A source of some interesting discussions at work is whether or not Kubernetes nodes should be virtualized. The thesis behind why this is not a good idea, is the...

Part 1 of this series covered installing Docker for Windows and the basic comands for managing SQL Server images and…

Last month I blogged about using Docker to run SQL Server as a quick and easy way to get SQL Server up and running. While it continues to be... The...