There’s been a lot of talk about the 2020 PASS Summit and how the impact of making it virtual this year. I’ve even previously written about it. I’ll be clear, I would prefer an in-person summit. But that said, I think having it virtual does provide for some fascinating and interesting possibilities and I look forward to seeing how they’re handled.  It will certainly be different being able to watch a session at a later time as a default option. And my understanding is that session schedules will no longer be constrained by the timezone the Summit is being held in.

That said, I also have to admit a certain bias here. I’ve wanted to speak at Summit for a couple of years now and have been turned down twice in the past two years. This year I was hoping again to speak, but alas, I procrastinated a bit too long and literally missed the original window to submit by a few hours.

Note I said original window. Because the Summit was moved to a virtual Summit the decision was made to re-open the call for speakers. This time I took advantage of that 2nd chance and submitted a bid.

And I’m so glad I did. Because if you didn’t have a reason to attend summit before, you do now! You get to hear me talk about PowerShell! So, I’ll admit to getting an unexpected benefit out of the move to a Virtual Summit.

I still recall one of my first attempts to use PowerShell at a client site, about 8 years ago. It did not go well. The security policy wouldn’t let me do what I wanted and the available knowledge on the Internet was sparse. Basically I wanted to loop through a list of servers and see if they had SQL Server installed. I eventually gave up on that project.

Since then though, I’ve been drawn to PowerShell and have come to love it. Now, when you hear a DBA talk about PowerShell, they will almost always mention dbatools. I want to go on record right now, I think it’s a GREAT addition, but I rarely use it. Not because there’s anything wrong with it, but mostly because my current usage is a bit different than what it provides. I do talk about it a bit here though.

For the talk I’ll be presenting, my plan is to start with a real simple PowerShell Script and slowly build on it until it’s a useful script for deploying SQL Scripts to multiple servers. For anyone who has read my articles at Red-Gate, much of this will be familiar territory, but I hope to cover in 75 minutes what I cover in 3-4 articles.

Checking this morning, I noticed that I’m among good company, and it’s humbling to see it, when it comes to speaking about PowerShell.

So, I hope you “come” and see me present on PowerShell at SQL Summit 2020. I’ll be in New York, where will you be?