Earlier this week, the governor of New Jersey put out a call for more COBOL programmers. Everything old is new again. Last time I remember such a call was around the year 2000. That said, while I never had the opportunity to learn COBOL, I’m amused by this. It reminds me of a quote I heard in college about Fortran and how one expert didn’t know what language engineers would be programming in in the 21st Century, but they’d call it FORTRAN.

But, I highlight these two languages because the truth is, they are the exception. In reality one has to constantly keep learning. The times, they are a changing as a poet once said. Fortunately for me I’ve been busy during this Covid-19 lockdown, but even still I have free time (some who read my blog may argue too much time!) That said, I’ve been trying to take more time to catch some webinars and to learn new skills.

Over the past few weeks I’ve got a couple of SQL PASS WIT Webinars under my belt. Last week however, I took advantage of Redgate’s Streamed event. (full disclosure: Redgate does pay me for the articles I write for Simpletalk but what I write here is not paid for by Redgate in any way).

There were a lot of great webinars and I did not catch all of them, so please don’t take my lack of mentioning any as a comment on their quality. There were also some I could only listen to partly as I was actually doing work at the time.

First off, I started with Kendra Little‘s session using git for database development. I’m still moving in this direction and it gave me a good insight into what I’m doing right and moreover what I’m doing wrong and how to improve it. I recommend this session to anyone trying to get version control into their database development.

Unfortunately I had to split attention to Grant Fritchey‘s session on learning to effectively use Extended Events (I do have to do billable work from time to time) but did catch some good stuff. Again, if you haven’t played with Extended Events, please do! I recently used them to help debug an issue I was having with a client and their Reporting Server (yes! you can write them for an SSAS instance!) Go Team #ExtEvents.

Andy Mallon’s session on shortcuts for the DBA was excellent and seemed to generate the most feedback in the chat window. I suggest you go to his page and find his print-out for keyboard shortcuts for SSMS. It’ll save you a lot of time. That said, watch the video if you can and see how well Kendra Little did on her “job interview”. (To be fair, I suspect most of us would have done about the same!)

Steve Jone’s session on unit tests was good, at least what I caught of it. Again, client work got in the way. I may go back to specifically watch this one.

After that, I had time to catch Grant Fritchey’s session on SQL Injection. It still amazes me how many programmers STILL write code so susceptible to this. He had a lot of great examples and offered some solutions. Note there’s no single right answer, but there’s definitely a lot of lousy answers.

Friday brought Rob Sewell speaking about SQL Notebooks and using Jupyter. I haven’t used this yet, but it’s on my list for the year.

Again, a great presentation by Grant Fritchey, this time on convincing the DBA to support DevOps. I’m come back to this in a bit.

I think the highlight of Friday was the costumes. In honor of SQLBits which was postponed this year, several of the presenters wore costumes. I think Steve Jones, with his hat, wig, and glasses won in the pure costume category. (You’ll have to check out the videos). But, that said, Kendra took the overall prize with her corgi Freya on her back in a pack. There was just something so wonderful watching her talk about index tuning as she’d casually feed a carrot over her shoulder.

Again there were other sessions and speakers, and even if I didn’t mention them, their presentations were top notch and worth the watch. Again, you can go to: https://www.red-gate.com/hub/events/redgate-events/redgate-streamed/ and catch them o demand. I recommend it.

One of the overarching themes I picked up on was an emphasis on DevOps and using both tools and processes to achieve a successful DevOps environment. Note that I think both are critical. One can have all the best tools, but without good processes, not much will be accomplished. Honestly, one take away I got was I’d rather have good processes and develop my own tools than have tools, but no process. This focus makes sense given Redgates focus on DevOps.  I now in the past I’ve made the mistake of simply thinking of them as a company that sells some cool tools.

I want to close with saying, one thing I appreciate about the #SQLFamily and Redgate does this well, is generally members focus more on solving problems than pushing specific products. I’ve attended more than one webinar hosted by RedGate where other than mentioning them as a sponsor, their name hasn’t come up at all. I’ve seen other members of #SQLFamily do the same thing. They may work for a company that provides tools and solutions, but if you use #sqlhelp on Twitter, you’ll find almost always it’s people there are about solving your problem, not pushing their software or solution.

So that was how I spent part of last week in lock-down. How about you?

P.S. I also made some boule bread to with the homemade chili on Saturday. It was a winner in the Moore House Hold.