I signed up for numerous sessions of 24 Hours of PASS not long after receiving notification of the event. It seemed like an ideal opportunity to preview some of the excellent speakers I was hoping to see at PASS in Seattle in November. I had high hopes about being able to stay awake for some of the overnight presentations!
My 24 hours started with Allen White’s talk on using PowerShell for managing SQL Server. I have been keenly interesting in learning more about PowerShell but I had no idea how it could be used with SQL Server. I had seen the link in Management Studio and probably tried it once or twice, but without knowing what to do with it, had never bothered with it again.
Starting PowerShell from the Windows command line does not give you the same features as starting PowerShell from within SQL Server Management Studio. The new features are found in snap-ins which contain SQL-specific cmdlets and an object explorer for navigating the SQL hierarchy. Fortunately the snap-ins can be added from the standard PowerShell command line to enable the features outside of Management Studio.
I also learned the common Windows commands like ‘dir’ and ‘cd’ are not actual PowerShell commands, but are aliases for Get-ChildItem and set-Location respectively.
I was really looking forward to Greg Low’s Working with Spatial Data session as I am currently struggling with adapting a process that’s been running on Oracle Spatial for years to SQL Server. Unfortunately, the session happened at 3am; I woke up in time for it, but didn’t manage to stay awake for more than 15 minutes. Top of my list for viewing the recordings!
I tuned into Grant Fritchey’s Query Performance Tuning 101 at a more reasonable hour in the morning. The different methods of capturing data about performance will certainly come in handy in my work.
I regret now that I didn’t register in advance for Kalen Delaney’s What’s Simple about Simple Recovery Model presentation. Another recording to be reviewed carefully.
I am certainly looking forward to when PASS posts the recorded sessions online so that I can watch the ones that I missed and review the ones that I did watch. Bravo for providing this event to the SQL community! I hope this will become an annual event.