Where’s Drew, November 2017 Edition

I’ve been back from Seattle and PASS Summit 2017 for about a week now, and I’m finally caught up enough on real life stuff to finally crank out some content. Of course, before I can get into that groove though, here’s where you can find me and what I’m working on this month:

  • I’ve been asked to speak at the Michiana PASS User Group on November 27th. The topic? PowerShell and SQL Server! I’ll be giving my Summit presentation, plus a little extra, for the fine folks of northern Indiana/southern Michigan. I’m still working out logistics of if it’s going to be in-person or remote, but as of this writing I am leaning towards in-person provided I can get a place to stay and work it into my actual day job schedule.
  • I have a new PowerShell function that I’ve been writing that should make getting information about your replicated databases and subscriptions easier to read and manage. The code itself is done, I’m just in testing right now. Expect a post about what it can do and why I wrote it by mid-month.
  • I’ll have a PASS Summit 2017 retrospective written within the next few days as well. As both a first time presenter and attendee, there was a lot to take in, and a lot to feel. If you enjoy that sort of writing and update, stay tuned.
  • Oh, and in case you missed it: I’m going to be doing a two-day online training course as part of Brent Ozar’s 2018 line-up of classes! This is going to be one of my biggest (and most challenging) projects to date, but I think it’s going to be a blast. If you’ve been looking for a place to start with PowerShell and work your way up to using it to automate stuff related to SQL Server, this may be the class for you. You get two days of online training, plus your VM to follow along and do labs in, and of course all the help you need from me. It’s filling up way faster than I anticipated, so sign up soon! In fact, the class is 50% off until the end of this week (11/10/2017) so don’t wait too long. If everything goes well, I’ll be looking to do this again, so if you can’t justify it right now, look for a future class later in 2018.
  • It’s outside of SQL-related things, but this month I am graduating from the Dublin Citizen’s Police Academy. No, that doesn’t mean I want to be a police officer. The City of Dublin has an excellent community outreach program that lets residents and people who work in Dublin the opportunity to learn about the Dublin Police Department. In addition to class time learning about criminal and civil matters, we also get to a fair amount of “hands-on” stuff, like shooting on their range, learning how finger print dust works, what goes into a safe and lawful traffic stop, and how dispatching works. It’s taken up a lot of my time over the last couple months, but it’s been a lot of fun. So much fun, in fact, that I’m giving a speech at graduation about the class. I can’t say enough good things about living and working in Dublin, Ohio.

And… that’s pretty much it. With time off for Thanksgiving coming up, some big projects winding down at work, and some other personal stuff finishing up I just want to try and enjoy some time to myself. I’m still available and I’m here if you want to reach out and ask for help. For those of you on the road for the upcoming holidays, I hope you have a safe and happy time!