I enjoyed the opportunity to test out my PASS Summit shell scripting session at SQL Saturday Denver. It was the first run on it and Glenn Berry sat in my session. Afterwards, this wise and long-standing member of the community had a very valuable piece of constructive criticism- change the background on my bash terminal for Azure Cloud Shell, as the black background and colors could be troublesome for some attendees. I agree with him- you never know what the projector quality will be, the lighting in the room, color-blind attendees or other factors that could impact the readability of …
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I’m still not sure where October went….well, actually I do- it was a flurry of travel, writing, (but not blogging!) and working with customers on a ton of new projects for the next quarter. With the end of October, comes the preparation for PASS Summit. Last year, I had to pass on the SQL Train, but this year? SQL Train is the annual pilgrimage from SQL Saturday Oregon, in Portland, to PASS Summit in Seattle via Amtrak train. Chris Hyde is the poor, tortured soul responsible for organizing this, but I hear that if you say you’ll volunteer, it’s like…
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I’ve been very busy allocating 60% of my time towards Oracle on Azure migrations. The biggest challenge right now isn’t getting Oracle on Azure, but keeping my percentage of time allocated to only 60%. I love Oracle technology- yes, a Microsoft employee who LOVES Microsoft and Azure cloud, also LOVES. Oracle. I won’t apologize and I know I’m not the only one. Every company I’ve worked for, even when I worked at Oracle, required my multi-platform skill set. I’ve never worked anywhere that had ONLY Oracle, only Linux, only Microsoft, only SQL Server, etc. I saw it only as…
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You know how busy I am by the amount of time I DON’T blog and yes, it’s been over a month. I think that’s the longest I haven’t blogged in YEARS. 24 HOP and Facebook Live I just finished my 24HOP, (24 hrs of PASS) session back on September 9th, the PASS Facebook Live session this last Monday and I’m thrilled with these virtual events each year I get the chance to participate. If you’re not familiar with 24HOP, its a preview of some of the sessions at Summit, the annual tech conference from PASS. Twenty four presenters are chosen…
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Microsoft has done a great job of documenting how to create a VM with the appropriate VM image and Oracle version, then how to log in, startup the listener and create the database. I just have some enhancements I’d like to make to it, hoping to help it move up one level. I Bequeath to You All instructions provided by the Microsoft documentation show how to connect to the database using a bequeath, (BEQ) connection. This is done by the following command, using SQL Plus, (or similar): sqlplus / as sysdba It bypasses the need for a connection string, only…
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We’ve learned a lot about commands, utilities and how to create a script, but we need to discuss the importance of scripting for longevity. What is Scripting for Longevity? We have a tendency to focus on scripting to automate something WE might not want to perform manually, but avoid what we think might void our value. We may try to ensure there is necessity for our role or our knowledge as we create scripts. This can be built into the execution process, scheduling, arguments, pre-run or post-run steps. This doesn’t make us an asset, but a liability and against what…
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If there’s one thing I’ve been able to prove this week, it’s that even with the sweet 4G LTE, Wi-Fi setup in my RV, Montana still has the worst Wi-Fi coverage in the US. Lucky for me, I work in the cloud and automate everything, because if there’s one thing I love about automating with scripts, is that I can build out a deployment faster and less resource intensive than anyone can from the portal. Oracle Virtual Machines in Azure When you build out an Azure VM, with Oracle, you’ll also need to have the supporting structure and a sufficiently…
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I keep saying I’m going to start sharing what I’m doing in the Analytics space soon, but heck, there’s too much I need to keep adding to on the Oracle in Azure arena! So, as most people know, I’m not a big fan of Oracle RAC, (Real Application Cluster). My opinion was that it was often sold for use cases that it doesn’t serve, (such as HA) and the resource demands between the nodes, as well as what happens when a node is evicted to those that are left are not in the best interest for most use cases. On…
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A couple weeks back, Oracle and Microsoft announced their cross-cloud partnership. This was wonderful news to me, as I’ve been working on numerous Oracle projects at Microsoft with Azure. The Gist To know that there is now a partnership between the two clouds and that there’s also a large amount of documentation about working between the two clouds is very helpful vs. the amount I’ve been working on based off just my knowledge. Just as anyone appreciates a second set of eyes, I now have two company’s worth! If you missed the announcement and curious what it’s about, Oracle has…
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This last week, I presented a few sessions at ODTUG’s KSCOPE 2019 conference in Seattle. One of these sessions was with my wonderful co-presenter and Oracle Application Cloud expert, Opal Alapat. I connected with her when the call for papers opened and asked her if there would be interest in doing a session with Power BI connect to the Essbase in the Oracle Applications cloud, (OAC). There was no desire to do a bake-off or competitive session, just a morbid curiosity about what options there were to connect the two and the outcome of building reports out of valuable data…
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Hard to believe its been one year, but it was June, 2018 when I joined the unstoppable company known as Microsoft. All-in Analytics I joined, with the expectation that I would leave much of what I had specialized in behind me- Oracle, along with other non-Microsoft database platforms, Linux, optimization and DevOps. I was excited to start my journey in business intelligence. Power BI was already starting to take over the world. I’d noticed the patterns, having only arrived on the BI scene in 2015, it was encompassing a larger percentage of speaker sessions and focus of content on the…
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In the previous blog posts, we learned how to set up the first part of a standard shell script- how to interactively set variables, including how to pass them as part of the script execution. In this next step, we’ll use those to build out Azure resources. If you’re working on-premises, you can use this type of scripting with SQL Server 2019 Linux but will need to use CLI commands and SQLCMD. I will cover this in later posts, but honestly, the cloud makes deployment quicker for any business to get what they need deployed and with the amount of…
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Almost every Linux or Unix person has seen the help forum post from a novice looking for an answer to a frustrating problem and the arrogant fool that responds with “Just type in rm -rf / and it will fix the problem.” For anyone who is part of the “do no harm” technical community, this can make us wish for a way to revoke the arrogant fool’s privileges to the internet— permanently. Recycling Commands This leads me to a great post from Carlos Robles this last week on using aliases with docker commands. As with many command line utilities, certain…
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Hello from Atlanta, where I’m preparing for tomorrow’s SQL Saturday and arrived for the great news announcing this year’s PASS Summit 2019 Learning Pathways. These sessions are two or more sessions to provide a more complete learning opportunity for the attendee. I’ll be part of two of these pathways: Technical Leadership: Becoming a Technical Leader with Denise McInerney Linux for SQL Server Professionals: Empowering the SQL Professional with Linux Scripting I’m looking forward both to the first, a leadership talk, as we rarely see a focus on how to forge a path in a technical career without often sacrificing our…
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In Part I, we started with some scripting basics, as in, how to write a script. This included the concepts of breaking a script into sections, (introduction, body and conclusion) For Part II, we’ll start with the BASH script “introduction”. The introduction in a BASH script should begin the same in all scripts. Set the shell to be used for the script Set the response to failure on any steps, (exit or ignore) Add in a step for testing, but comment out or remove when in production For our scripts, we’ll keep to the BASH format that is used by…
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Many see scripting as a science, but if you want to write not just functional scripts, but efficient and easy to work with scripts, it is also an art. Most SQL DBAs are feeling the pressure to learn BASH as they enter Azure and I strongly recommend it. I’m learning PowerShell as part of my education coming from a Linux background to Azure. It’s all about “the more you know”….you know? So let’s start with learning it right. Scripts = Stories A good script has the following parts to it: An Introduction A Body A Conclusion We’re going to focus…
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I do a LOT of scripting. Given the choice to click in a GUI vs. typing at the command line, I’ll choose the command line. Given the choice to type commands in repeatedly vs. scripting out a task I perform more than twice, I’ll script. Scripting effectively is an art as much as it’s a science. Where a GUI can change, both in content, as well as layout, a script is less impacted by this when it is designed to dynamically work with the catalog. You have the choice to either work with the values in an array or to…
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Azure Directory is available with Linux SQL Server 2019 in Preview and as I was setting it up in my Azure environment on a Linux Red Hat 7.3 VM, I was, as many are, happy that they list the commands for the Azure CLI to set up authentication with Azure Directory, but was concerned, that with so many new to Linux, that they didn’t describe in the steps WHY we were running certain commands or setting best practices around Linux database server design. The setup expects that you already have a Linux VM and SQL 2019 already up and running.…