John McCormack's blogs

Using ChatGPT for the first time

7th December 2022 By John McCormack Leave a Comment

I played with ChatGPT for the first time today. For those who don’t know what ChatGPT is, I asked it and this was the response.

ChatGPT is an open-source chatbot framework that enables developers to quickly create natural language understanding chatbots using the GPT-3 language model.
https://beta.openai.com/playground

If that still doesn’t make sense, I asked it to explain in a less technical style.

ChatGPT is a tool that makes it easy for developers to create chatbots that can understand and respond to natural language conversations.
https://beta.openai.com/playground

[Read more…]

DataGrillen 2022 – Photos and notes

8th June 2022 By John McCormack Leave a Comment

I’m just back from DataGrillen 2022. As ever, I wanted to put together a short post and use the opportunity to share some things I learned, and share some photos of the event. First of all, thanks for such a hospitable welcome from William Durkin and Ben Weissman and congratulations for hosting a very successful event.

On top of everything else that goes into planning a complex event like this, they also had an added responsibility this time to keep people free of covid as far as was reasonably possible. This meant mandatory testing, vaccine passports and masking wearing (inside only). It was a small price to pay after two years of online conferences only.

The barbecue event was on the middle night after the sessions. There was a great choice of food and everything was cooked really well, and of course there were complimentary beers to wash it down.

Following on from the main event which comprised of two days of technical sessions, the host town of Lingen was celebrating the historic Kivelingsfest, a medieval festival dating back hundreds of years. As a result, many of the conference attendees stayed on an extra day to attend the festival which was great fun.

It was home on Sunday but not before we got the chance to celebrate André Kamman’s by taking a boat trip along Amsterdam’s canals.

Datagrillen 2022 photos

Andrew Pruski DeepDive into Docker presentation

DataGrillen 2022 Sessions

These are the sessions I attended. I tried to fit in as much as possible from the two day event.

John Martin – Performing successful cloud migrations – Chalk & talk

It was a very informal delivery by John who guided us through a timeline and the phases of a successful cloud migration. It was a cloud agnostic session so the key information could be used with any major cloud provider.

Andrew Pruski – A deep dive into Docker

I wanted to attend this as I haven’t used Docker a great deal and I wanted to learn more. Andrew provided a great overview and worked through some very well prepared demos. I am keen to try to follow these up by visiting his github repo for the content.

Gianluca Sartori – Time Series for relational people

Gianluca gave a great overview of the differences between relational and time series databases and went on to review a few. He settled on influxdb and demonstrated in detail how it could be used along with Grafana and Telegraf agent (TIG stack) to provide really useful metrics. I do use the TIG stack in my work but I learned about some great settings for dealing with or discarding older data that I plan to take forward.

Monica Rathbun – Performance tuning Azure SQL Database

This session was packed to the rafters and extremely hot, yet Monica’s enthusiastic and engaging style made it so easy to stay focused on the message. The message was delivered well and easy to understand. I took away some key information here regarding query store and readable secondary databases. Overall, it was my favourite session of DataGrillen 2022.

Argenis Fernandez – Ransomware sucks. Beef up your databases against it.

This had to be close contender for my top session. Argenis knew what he was talking about and it showed. He gave very good advice and I have returned home with a checklist that I will need to turn into an action plan.

André Kamman – Looking under the hood of the parquet format

I’m familiar with parquet as I use AWS Athena a lot however I’ve never really looked under the hood. I honestly expected this session to be a bit above me but André’s communication style made it very accessible for attendees of all knowledge levels and easy to follow along.

Jess Pomfret and Sander Stad – Deploying Azure Resources with PowerShell Azure Functions

Jess and I were fellow newcomers at Data Grillen in 2019. I always enjoy her sessions so this was not to be missed. It was my first time seeing Sander and the two presenters worked well to deliver this session. I left convinced that I need to change at least one part of my automation routine to include Azure functions, so I will hopefully be checking them out this week. (If time allows, the trouble with conferences is you return home with SO many ideas)

Heini Ilmarinen – Less Clicking, More Coding! Azure Data Platform Development Using Infrastructure as Code

I’ve dipped my toe into Terraform but I’ve used BICEP and Cloud formation a bit more. After Heini’s session, I get the benefits of Terraform and I’ve added it to my ever increasing list of things to review. A great session in which Heini did well to keep us engaged all the way through.

Robert French – Goldilocks and the three business bears; story telling for business

This was the last session of a very busy two days. They broke the mould when they made Robert and as expected, his session also broke the mould. Robert delivered the session with unmatchable energy, kind of at a blistering pace but the pace was just right at the same time. He got through a huge amount of visual aids. He gave great advice on where you eyes are drawn to in report, how to make key data pop out and how to usual colours and fonts carefully.

Free space in SQL server filegroups query

25th March 2022 By John McCormack 1 Comment

I just realised that in all my scripts that I use on a regular basis, I didn’t have one for working out free space in SQL Server filegroups. It’s not something that comes up too often but it’s handy to know. For methods of working out space in individual files, you could refer to this post on mssqltips.

-- Free space by filegroup
SELECT
FILEGROUP_NAME(data_space_id) as FilegroupName,
SUM(size/128.0) AS CurrentSizeMB, 
SUM(size/128.0 - CAST(FILEPROPERTY(name, 'SpaceUsed') AS INT)/128.0) AS FreeSpaceMB,
(
	SUM(size/128.0 - CAST(FILEPROPERTY(name, 'SpaceUsed') AS INT)/128.0) / -- FreeSpaceMB
	(SUM(size/128.0))  -- CurrentSizeMB
	* 100 -- Convert to percentage
) AS FilegroupPercentFree,
COUNT(*) as NumberOfFilesInFilegroup
FROM sys.database_files
WHERE data_space_id <> 0
GROUP BY FILEGROUP_NAME(data_space_id);

POST #100

I just realised as well that this is post #100 on my blog. I started it just to save some of my queries and ideas. Post #1 was a really simple query but it got me going.

Falling back in love with Data Community events

14th March 2022 By John McCormack Leave a Comment

Data Community Events

Last week, I had hoped to go to SQLBits conference in London but a variety of factors meant I could really only attend the Saturday morning sessions (and virtually at that). I’ve really missed Data Community Events like SQLBits and others.

I wanted to go because I’ve been slightly disengaged from the data community for a year or so, probably due a combination of factors such as lockdowns, zoom fatigue and a few speaking knock backs in the last year which dented my confidence a bit. However I wanted to at least attend SQLBits in part, in the hope it would inspire me and kick start some new blogging and possibly presenting opportunities. I’ve had some great times attending and presenting at data community events in the past such as at DataGrillen, DataScotland, and SQLBits and I knew it would be worth the effort to get back into the swing of things.

Just attend some sessions and take it from there

Attending sessions where you know little or nothing of the subject matter can be extremely rewarding.

I’m glad I did. The sessions I attended were all extremely enlightening and I enjoyed following along. One thing that immediately came back to me is that attending sessions where you know little or nothing of the subject matter can be extremely rewarding. These sessions serve to keep you informed of the overall technology trends and who is doing what. For example, I won’t have much opportunity to use Azure Arc in the near future but it’s been around long enough that I can’t ignore it completely. Attending Ben Weissman’s 20 minute taster session was just enough and it gave me some ideas about how it could be used in co-ordination with our on premises environment. I also really enjoyed learning about the developments to SQL Managed Instance since I last used them over a year ago. Some of the improvements released during the previous 12 months could actually make it a far more viable product for my company.

Keep it going

Thursday night (17th March 2022) sees the the latest meeting of the Glasgow Data User Group. I will make a point of attending, even although the speaker is discussing ETL in the cloud which is not a big area of professional interest for me, I know I will learn something and I hope it will entertaining as well as informative. Plus it will be good to see some old faces, albeit we are still remote.

12 blog posts

I committed to 12 blog posts this year, this one can serve as #1 and it gets me started. Hopefully by attending many other events, I can find the inspiration needed to get back to creating my own content and keeping up with developments in the data community. As well as keeping up with old friends.

T-SQL Tuesday #143 Wrap Up

19th October 2021 By John McCormack 2 Comments

What an honour it was to host T-SQL Tuesday this month and I received some really great submissions. This wrap up post aims to give a quick insight into each of them in the hope that more members of the SQL Family can find some time to click on them and learn more. I counted 22 posts including my own which was a great response. If you missed the original invite, you can find the link below.

T-SQL Tuesday #143 – Short code examples

I learned so much by hosting this and made sure I gave due care to reading every post. It was also a lot of fun and allowed me to interact with people in the community that I haven’t met before. If you haven’t hosted T-SQL Tuesday before, please contact Steve Jones as we are always looking for new hosts.

Wrap Up

Rob Farley – Short and to the point like I asked for, Rob details a quick way to find objects. And he was happy to clear up for the reader that I didn’t mean GOTO as in the old BASIC syntax you could run on your commodore 64. (For me it was an Amstrad CPC464)
http://blogs.lobsterpot.com.au/2021/10/12/go-to-scripts/

Koen Verbeek – Koen shows us numbers tables, tally tables and a dates table. These are really useful constructs for allowing your queries to go “set based”. Essential reading for anyone who cares about performance. https://sqlkover.com/t-sql-tuesday-143-short-code-examples/

Aaron Bertrand – Aaron shows us how he “bulletproofs” his answers for dba.stackexchange and Stack Overflow. db<>fiddle was new to me. I love some of Aaron’s demo database names like [master (Restoring…)]. I ran the create command on my test instance and had to drop the DB right away as it was giving me the chills.
https://sqlblog.org/2021/10/12/t-sql-tuesday-143-worst-metadata

Deborah Melkin – Deborah shows us a really useful debugging trick when creating stored procedures that use dynamic sql. Many of us have been lost in dynamic sql at some point, and this snippet is great at helping you see where you are.
https://debthedba.wordpress.com/2021/10/12/t-sql-tuesday-143-short-code-examples/

Kenneth Fisher – Kenneth shares a compendium of previous posts which all require some serious reading. My favourite was “all jobs that ran during a given time frame”
https://sqlstudies.com/2021/10/12/code-examples-t-sql-tuesday-143/

Jeff Hill – Jeff shared 4 great PowerShell snippets. True to this month’s request, they are short and incredibly useful. Want to know what version of Windows you are running on your Server or when it was last rebooted, look no further.
https://sqladm.in/posts/tsql-tuesday-143/

Chad Baldwin – Chad is a newcomer to T-SQL Tuesday and chipped in with a stellar first post. I must admit, I’ve never given much thought to how to format a result set as I’ll usually do it in the client, but when you need to; it is possible as Chad shows. But that’s only the start. There’s too much to discuss in this digest as he also covers tally tables, random numbers and overcoming the divide by 0 problem. Did I mention he also covers docker, monitoring/filtering log files and setting aliases. Cap doffed.
https://chadbaldwin.net/2021/10/12/tsql-tuesday-short-code.html

Andy Yun – Random numbers, random delays (I wonder if Scotrail use this script) and random strings. Thanks Andy for a great post. There are great scripts on their own and for building into more complex ones.
https://sqlbek.wordpress.com/2021/10/12/t-sql-tuesday-143-random-fun/

Kevin Chant – Kevin discusses just how to get the most out Glenn Berry’s diagnostic scripts, specifically in relation to missing indexes. He also shows a create table syntax and highlights how effective it has been for him in his training sessions around Dev Ops.
https://www.kevinrchant.com/2021/10/12/t-sql-tuesday-143-two-of-my-personal-go-to-scripts/

Andy Mallon – Andy stores all of his useful scripts in a DBA database. It’s a popular approach and I was hoping someone would mention this. Andy goes beyond this though and has converted a lot of scripts into Stored Procedures. Whilst having a local scripts folder is great; if you can put your code into a stored procedure in a database which you deploy to all the servers you manage, there is no need to panic and find the scripts when the pressure is on. I must admit I love this approach and I’ll be downloading Andy’s database to look further into it.
https://am2.co/2021/10/t-sql-tuesday-143-my-favorite-short-scripts/

Jason Brimhall – Jason talks about all things endpoints here and I found the code examples so handy. I’ve already used them. Not only can you use them to validate your endpoints, but you can also use them to fix some issues as well. On a personal note, just what I needed.
http s ://bit.ly/3lAOMmF

Tom Zika – Tom shares loads of useful snippets including regex and t-sql. Wow – one regex snippet shows us how to find table variable declarations and turn them into temp tables. You could make a killing selling this one trick to consultants. Tom also shares a mega handy way to check permissions using impersonation as well as a great method to find referencing objects.
https://straightforwardsql.com/posts/short-code-examples/

Mikey Bronowski – Mikey shows us a handy way to execute multiple queries including dynamic ones and also tells us about agent_datetime() function. I have to admit I’ve never used that function but it looks so useful for when you are interrogating those msdb agent job tables. I will definitely be adding it my list. Finally, he shares a useful query for pulling back table data with his added enhancement (however a nice little plug for DBATools hints he now has a better way of approaching this).
https://bronowski.it/t-sql-tuesday-143-short-code-examples/

Todd Kleinhans – Todd focuses on Python and he is the only person to do so. I won’t give away his one liner but it’s just the sort of thing I was looking for. Are you feeling Zen?
https://toddkleinhans.wordpress.com/2021/10/12/t-sql-tuesday-143-import-this/

Mala Mahadevan – Mala shares some top class queries for interrogating query store. Query store has so much useful data that knowing how to get started querying it will be a big win for some.
https://curiousaboutdata.com/2021/10/12/tsql-tuesday-143-short-code-examples/

Chad Callihan – Chad mentioned 3 handy t-sql snippets and then shared a gem for keeping Brent Ozar’s First Responder Kit up to date. (Hint he uses DBATools). DBATools and FRK are amongst the most essential free tools for any DBA and beyond. If you run anything like sp_blitz or sp_blitzcache, it’s worth keeping it up to date and this method shows how to do it in only a few lines of code.
https://callihandata.com/2021/10/12/t-sql-tuesday-143-handy-short-scripts/

Deepthi Goguri – Deepthi shares some of the best of the rest by highlighting some of her favourite community scripts. From help with migrations to troubleshooting replication, it just goes to show that there’s no need to reinvent the wheel when there’s a perfectly good script out there that meets your needs.
https://dbanuggets.com/2021/10/12/t-sql-tuesday-143-short-code-examples/

Steve Jones – Did you know that you could get a tally table with just 4 key strokes? Steve shows you how, leveraging on the power of SQL Prompt by Redgate. This is taking snippets to a new level.
https://voiceofthedba.com/2021/10/13/t-sql-tuesday-143-short-code/

Jess Pomfret – Aloha to Jess who squeezes her entry in on time due to the Hawaiian time loophole. Want to find out if certain accounts are local admins on remote servers? Jess shares a quick and efficient method for finding this out. Being Jess, of course she is using PowerShell to make her life easier. I for one will be stealing this.
https://jesspomfret.com/t-sql-tuesday-143/

Eitan Blumin – Eitan takes the opportunity to link to some of his past blog posts which are full of useful code however he doesn’t stop there. With a new entry for T-SQL Tuesday, Eitan shows us how to move database files to a new location in Always On Availability Groups without breaking HADR. Ok at 374 lines, it’s a bit more than a snippet but it’s really great code so we’ll let that one slide.
https://eitanblumin.com/2021/10/13/t-sql-tuesday-143-powershell-move-db-files-alwayson-availability-groups/

Shane O’Neill – Shane also mentions agent_datetime(). It’s a cool function for converting the very user unfriendly ms format that we see in msdb tables. Shane points out it might not be the most efficient function however when you don’t have much data to bring back, it’s much quicker than rewriting the thing. Shane being Shane (Big Powershell fan) also points out a few great PowerShell commands for formatting and sorting and shows how they can be used in conjunction with other commands that yield really useful results.
https://nocolumnname.blog/2021/10/12/t-sql-tuesday-143-short-code-examples/

P.S. I’ve taken every bit of care to check my comments and on twitter but if I have missed your post, please let me know and I’ll include it immediately.