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This week I had the opportunity to learn about dashboards, reports, and datasets in Power BI using the best kind of teaching tool: fresh, delicious, chocolate chip cookies.

Be our guest for the web's premier Power BI food show as Eugene Meidinger (@SQLGene) explains how these concepts relate to each other and then grab a second helping with his blog post that will leave you feeling full.

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This week I was fortunate enough to film a video in collaboration with Pinal Dave, the SQL Authority himself.  Pinal is creative, hilarious, and kind; making this video with him was A BLAST!

Although the video is a little tongue in cheek, Pinal's recommendations are very real: I've encountered plenty of scenarios where these solutions fixed slow queries.  Will these recommendations fix the problem in every situation?  Of course not, but they are a great place to start.

Instead of creating a text version of the concepts covered in the video (you should really watch it), I thought it would be fun to do a behind-the-scenes narrative of how the video came together because it is unlike any other project I've done before.

The Idea

After agreeing to make a video together, we tossed around a few ideas.  Because we live in different time zones, we thought it would be a fun to do something where I kept waking Pinal up in the middle of the night.

We iterated over what SQL Server examples to use (originally the second example was going to show my queries running out of space because autogrowth being turned off).  We also ended up adding another example after my wife suggested that having it build to three scenarios instead of two would be funnier - I agree!

Asynchronous Filming

You've probably already figured it out, but I didn't really wake Pinal up in the video (honestly, I think midnight would be too early to wake him up anyway; in our back and forth emails, I was seeing responses from him that were in the 1-2am range).

I filmed a preliminary version of my parts of the video, very roughly edited them together, and sent it over to Pinal.

He then filmed his segments, giving me lots of great footage (I'm not sure if it was ad-libbed or not, but I was dying of laughter when watching through his clips).

Then I re-filmed my parts to try to match his dialog as closely as possible.  Re-filming my parts also allowed me to self-edit and not ramble as much.

Everything Else

After that, it was just the usual process of editing, color correction, audio processing, etc...

I'm happy with how it turned out, especially given all of the technical challenges we had with filming separately.

Major thanks again to Pinal for being supportive and willing to make a fun SQL Server video.  Enjoy!

This month's T-SQL Tuesday topic asked "What code would you hate to live without?" Turns out you like using script and code to automate boring, repetitive, and error-prone tasks.

Thank you to everyone who participated; I was nervous that July holidays and summer vacations would stunt turnout, however we wound up with 42 posts!

Watch tsqltuesday.com for next month's topic and consider signing up to host.

Watch this week's video on YouTube

Without further ado, here are this month's entries sorted in random order:

• Stuart Moore shares the history behind needing to automate restore testing and writing the SqlAutoRestores PowerShell module to help.  Nowadays his commands are found in dbatools.  Great example of how a project can evolve through the community.
• Arthur Daniels shares his script to identify the key and included columns of indexes in a given table.
• Glenn Berry shares his DMV Diagnostic Queries and the story behind how he started developing them back in 2006.
• Jason Brimhall links to multiple scripts he's shared in the past as well as a new script for remotely auditing server access to catch infilitraters red-handed.
• Doug Purnell talks about how he uses database snapshots and shares some code for how he manages them.
• Jay Robinson shares two C# extensions (shout to my fellow devs!): one to check an enum for a value and a second to cleanly handle the lengthy DBNull.Value syntax.
• Drew Furgiuele shares how he scripts out his indexes to re-apply after snapshot replication.  He then writes very similar functionality using PowerShell in only 6 lines!
• Tim Weigel shares which community scripts he uses regularly, as well as sharing his own scripts around replication, stored procedure execution information, and file manipulation.
• Hugo Kornelis submitted two posts.  The first post shares sp_metasearch which helps with performing impact analysis and the second post follows up with an enhancement he's made to Ola Hallengren's database maintenance scripts to ignore backup BizTalk databases.
• Andy Mallon shares his comprehensive script for checking database, file, data, log, etc... sizes.  Great explanations of his reasoning for writing the queries the way he did.
• Dan Clemens shares his database search script with a switch that includes searching across agent jobs.
• Jess Pomfret wrote a script that shows compression stats for database objects.  Wanting to run it against a whole instance (or across mulitple servers), she wrote a dbatools command to automate the process.
• Kenneth Fisher shows us how he organizes his toolbox using an SSMS solution.
• Rob Farley shares code he's written to demonstrate the pain of using NOLOCK.
• Steve Jones shares a procedure from Microsoft that he uses for transferring logins and passwords between instances.
• Kevin Hill shares two scripts he uses for finding low-hanging index optimization fruit: one that finds queries performing heap or clustered index scans, and another that returns the top 5 missing indexes per database.
• Michael Villegas learned that Azure SQL doesn't allow you to graphically show user roles and permissions, so he wrote a script to query those details (works for on-premise SQL Server as well).
• Nate Johnson shares scripts that identify if tables are being replicated, whether SSRS subscriptions executed, and how much space certain objects and files are consuming.
• William Andrus shares how he uses his search script to find similarly named fields or all instances of a piece of text within a database.
• Bert Wagner (me!) I share my template for generating dynamic table-driven code, making queries more adaptable to future changes.
• Rudy Rodarte shows us a script he uses for iterating over a date range to use for executing date based queries.
• Brent Ozar admits he can't live without sp_Blitz, but this month he shares a script for checking how much plan cache history exists on a server.
• Jeff Mlakar offers a solution for taking all databases on an instance offline (and then back online) again.
• Erik Darling offers a solution for constructing dynamic SQL so that his MAX variables don't get truncated.  He also links to a script for printing long strings in SSMS.
• Chrissy LeMaire takes the hard work out of instance to instance migrations by sharing her single-line dbatools command that will do it all for you.  She also shares how dbachecks automates manual checklist work.
• Glenda Gable mentions two procedures, one that is a high performance cursor rewrite and one  that is a robust log shipping solution.
• Aaron Bertrand shows us how he discovers undocumented SQL Server features by comparing new builds to the previous versions.
• Ryan Desmond writes about his post-install confirguration process and shares code he runs to customize Ola Hallengren's maintenance scripts for his environments.
• Josh Simar shares his database file size code that is optimized for "very large databases" that span multiple files and filegroups.
• Sander Stad discusses the importance of sharing code and offers a few dbatools commands that he's contributed to or authored around backup testing, log shipping, and SQL Server Agent manipulation.
• Andy Levy wrote an SSMS snippet to generate a cursor.  Before you chew him out though, he has some really good uses cases for needing to use them.
• Andy Yun reveals what's in his T-SQL toolbox and explains his organization strategies for 10+ years of scripts he's collected.
• Eduardo Pivaral shares a script he uses to output query results into an HTML table, making it easy to copy into an email.
• Raul Gonzalez shows us a versatile script for searching database tables and returning information on attributes such as column name, size, key definitions, and more.
• Matthew McGiffen wanted to find the most expensive queries on an instance using Query Store instead of the traditional DMVs, so he wrote a script to do just that.
• Daniel Hutmacher shares his beefed up version of sp_help.  Includes ASCII art dependency graphs and database search.
• Christian Gräfe provides a function he wrote for padding the left-side of a value with zeros.
• Adrian Buckman  shares his SQLUndercover Inspector HTML reporting tool, as well as scripts for helping to alter AG groups, checking for running jobs, and auditing failed logins.
• Louis Davidson shares his technique for using relative positioning in date tables to make querying custom periods (eg. your company's fiscal month) easier.
• Lance England shares a PowerShell script to automate generating upsert merge statements for his ETLs.

This post is a response to this month's T-SQL Tuesday #102 prompt by Riley Major. T-SQL Tuesday is a way for SQL Server users to share ideas about different database and professional topics every month.

The prompt I've chosen to write about this month is how and why I got started contributing to the SQL Server community.

Watch this week's video on YouTube

About a year ago, I was determined to improve my presentation skills.  I knew that in order to do that I needed to get more practice speaking.

I already was at my max for presenting at local user groups, conferences, etc... because at some point it becomes too cost and time prohibitive to travel to more events.  As an alternative, I decided that if I couldn't get more practice by speaking in person, I could at least film myself presenting.

And I figured if I'm already filming myself presenting, I might as well put a little extra polish on it and make the content available for others to watch.

And that is how I started filming weekly videos about SQL Server.

SQL Server Videos

There are already plenty of great SQL Server presentations on YouTube, spanning a plethora of topics from a variety of experts who know way more about SQL Server than me.

Whenever I want to learn about a SQL Server topic, I search for something like "SQL Server backups" or "SQL Server columnstore indexes" on YouTube.  There are plenty of great recorded presentations, virtual chapter screencasts, Q&As, and other tutorials for learning almost any topic you can imagine.

However, sometimes I'm not in the mood to watch in-depth hour long presentations.  Sometimes I want to watch a short, informative, regularly scheduled entertaining SQL videos - and this is where I saw a gap in programming.

So what better way to get what you want than by scratching your own itch.  I figured if I want to watch that type of SQL Server video, then I'm sure other people out there want to watch those same kinds of short SQL videos too.

Bert, the Director

When I was a kid, I wanted to be a movie maker.  In particular, I was entranced by special effects, so I made movies with friends that involved plenty of lightsabers, explosions, and green screen effects all throughout middle school and high school.

So while making SQL videos wasn't going to be totally new territory, I sure was unprepared for all of the initial work involved.

For the first three months, I was spending 15-20 hours per week writing, creating demos, shooting, editing, publishing, and marketing my videos.  Over time I've cut this process down to 8-10 hours a week, a more manageable amount of work that I can mostly get done on weekend mornings before the rest of the house wakes up.

Results

Making videos about SQL Server has been an amazing experience.  Not only do I personally feel fulfilled creating something week after week that improves my own skills, but it's rewarding to receive positive feedback via comments, messages, and emails that I'm also helping others become better SQL developers.

Contributing has also made me appreciate how amazing the #sqlfamily community truly is.  Everyone I talk to is wonderful and supportive, and everyone I meet wants to see one another succeed.

Your Turn

If you aren't already, I hope you consider contributing to the community .  Whether it be via blog posts, code contributions, presenting, tweeting, or making videos, giving back to the SQL Server community will grow your own skills and allow you to meet some really great people.

It can be scary putting yourself out there publicly, but don't let that stop you.  If you give it your best then the SQL Server community won't let you down.

Watch this week's video on YouTube

In this week's video with Power BI expert Eugene Meidinger, we're in the kitchen learning about Power BI.

Power BI has two languages available for working with data: Power Query and DAX.

Power Query is most useful cleaning and preparing your data as it comes from a variety of sources: Excel, csv, SQL Server, etc...

DAX is the heavy hitter that allows you mix all of these disparate data sources into a singel Power BI model.

Be sure to visit Eugene's blog post for more detailed information.