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In order to stay current in a technology you have to immerse yourself in community content.

Documentation is good for knowing the specification of a language or tool and books or training courses are great for when you want to dive deep on a particular topic. However in many technology fields, including SQL Server, one of the best ways to stay up to date is by following blogs.

Not only are blogs posts typically showing newer features and techniques that haven't been able to make their way into books and training courses yet, they often will cover more specialized scenarios and edge cases than you'll encounter in the traditional learning sources. Following a broad user base of SQL Server professionals who blog solutions to problems they encounter and will often open your eyes to features of the tools you use everyday that you weren't even aware of.

This is especially nice for times when I'm not actively learning a specific topic. Reading a variety of blogs on various SQL Server subjects often reminds me how much I don't know and how many features I don't use during my day-to-day work. These blogs also serve as inspiration to investigate ideas further.

RSS Feeds

My favorite way to follow other SQL Server blogs is by subscribing to RSS feeds. I use Feedly as my RSS feed reader of choice (RIP Google Reader) and browse through all of my feeds whenever I have downtime. Inspired by Brent Ozar's post last year, I'm sharing all of the RSS feeds I follow in this OPML file.

You can download the OPML file and import it into your RSS reader as a starting point, or go through the list of websites and see if you find something new. I decided to also include my non-SQL feeds in the above link too (they are categorized in appropriate sections) in case you are curious about what sites I follow for other programming and career topics.

It's impossible to stay up to date with all the information that I want to, but staying up to date on RSS feeds gets me close.

I'm always looking for more sources - RSS is so easy to consume - so if you have any suggestions please let me know!

This past weekend I had a blast presenting Joker's Wild with Erin Stellato (blog|twitter), Andy Mallon (blog|twitter), and Drew Furgiuele (blog|twitter).

Watch this week's video on YouTube

Table of contents:

• What is Joker's Wild? Watch this to witness Andy's amazing PowerPoint animation skills (0:00)
• Bert demos SQL injection (2:25)
• Erin recollects desserts (9:55)
• Andy shares an automation tip (18:55)
• Andy explains an ANSI standard (23:10)
• Drew describes containers (27:02)

While a video doesn't quite give you the same experience as being in the room with dozens of other data professionals laughing and shouting along, hopefully it gives you an idea.

Here's a behind-the-scenes peek at how it all came together.

A Different Kind Of Presentation

I've wanted to do a "fun" SQL Server presentation for a while; something that would be lighthearted while still delivering (some) educational value.

I ran some ideas past Erin after SQL Saturday Cleveland earlier this year. We came up with several concepts ideas we could incorporate into the presentation (thanks to Paul Popovich and Luis Gonzalez for also helping us generate a lot of these ideas) and at that point I think Erin came up with the name "Joker's Wild."

Blind Commitment

Fast forward a few months: occasionally I'd talk about the presentation idea with people but still wasn't any closer to actually making it real.

Then a few days before the SQL Saturday Columbus submission deadline, Erin reached out to ask if we were going to submit. We recruited Andy and Drew to help present and submitted an abstract:

Come one, come all to the greatest (and only) SQL Server variety show at SQL Saturday Columbus.

This session features a smattering of lightning talks covering a range of DBA- and developer-focused SQL Server topics, interspersed with interactive games to keep the speakers and audience on their toes.

Plan for plenty of sarcasm, laughs, and eye rolls in this thoughtfully structured yet highly improvised session.

We can't guarantee what you'll learn, but we do promise a great time!

*Slot machine will not generate real money for "winners"

Structure

If that abstract reads a little vague, it's because at that point we didn't know exactly what we wanted to do yet. Once our session was selected though it was time to come up with a concrete plan (big thank you to David Maxwell and Peter Shore for giving us the opportunity to try something like this).

After some discussion, Erin, Andy, Drew, and I came up with the following structure:

1. The audience will choose the lightning talk topic
2. We will spin the "Wheel of Misfortune" to determine the presentation style, including:
   • Slides I didn't write
   • Random slide timing
   • Who has the clicker?
3. We will play some SQL Server themed Jeopardy and Pictionary with the audience

After our first meeting Andy created the world's most versatile PowerPoint presentation that would run the show. Seriously, if you haven't watched the video above yet, go watch it - that introduction is all PowerPoint goodness created by him.

The Session and Final Thoughts

I'm incredibly happy with how it all went. The session was planned but a lot of it was still left up to a highly improvised performance. I had a lot of fun preparing and presenting, and I think the session was well received by the audience. Jeopardy and Pictionary were a lot of fun too, even though I ran out of video recording space so I couldn't include them in the video.

I hope we have another opportunity to present this session again in the future.

Thank you again David and Peter for letting us do this session as part of SQL Saturday Columbus.

Thank you to our audience for taking a risk on attending a session you didn't know much about. Also for your great participation.

And thank you Erin, Andy, and Drew for helping do something fun and different.

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dbatools is one of the coolest community projects I've seen - it is amazing how many commands are available to help make managing your SQL Server instances a breeze.

This week I had the opportunity to learn how to use dbatools to automate backups, change recovery models, and discover additional dbatools commands from dbatools contributor Jess Pomfret.

The video above goes over the basics, but be sure to check out Jess's companion blog post to learn more about these commands.

And once you start using dbatools and have ideas for adding more functionality, check out a previous video I did with Drew Furgiuele to learn about contributing to the community project yourself.

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While most of us strive to make as few mistakes as possible when it comes to our servers and data, accidents do occasionally happen.

Sometimes those accidents are easily fixed while other times the solutions require herculean efforts (usually accompanied by lots of caffeine and cursing...or is that just me?).

This week I'm excited to have guests Andy Mallon (t), Erin Stellato (t), and Mr. ANONYMOUS (t) (don't spoil the fun by clicking these links until after watching!) share some of their most memorable SQL Server mishaps.

It's a video only post so be sure to watch above or on my YouTube channel (and be sure to watch until the end for a special...furry...cameo).

Watch this week's video on YouTube

What happens when you run into performance tuning expert Pinal Dave?  Talk about how to troubleshoot a slow performing SQL Server of course!

This week is all about the video, so if you can't view it above, head on over to my YouTube channel to watch it there.

After watching, be sure to check out Pinal's free performance diagnostic scripts over at SQLAuthority.com:

• Replacement for DBCC INPUTBUFFER: sys.dm_exec_input_buffer
• Finding the longest running queries.
• Introduction to wait statistics