My new course “LFCE: Linux Service Management – HTTP Services” in now available on Pluralsight here! If you want to learn about the course, check out the trailer here or if you want to dive right in check it out here! This course targets IT professionals that design and maintain RHEL/CentOS based enterprises. It aligns with the Linux Foundation Certified System Administrator (LFCS) and Linux Foundation Certified Engineer (LFCE) and also Redhat’s RHCSA and RHCE certifications.

Earlier this week Ned Otter (@NedOtter) brought up a question about Instant File Initialization on SQL Server on Linux, check out the thread here. I was up way too early in the morning, as I normally am, so I decided to poke around and see how it was done. SQL Server pros, here you can see you can get some deep internal information from the OS very easily. Hopefully with this blog post you’ll be able to compare how this is done on Windows and draw the connections between the two platforms and leverage this technique in other areas.

So I’ve been using dbatools for automated restore tasks and came across a SQL Server Agent job that I wrote that was reporting success but the job was actually failing. What I found was the function I used, Restore-DbaDatabase, was not able to access the path that I was trying to restore databases from. The Restore-DbaDatabase function, and all dbatools functions according to the dbatools team on Slack, will throw a Warning rather than an Error by design.

A few weeks back several SQL Server bloggers discussed their academic pasts…well here I’m going to let you in on a little secret of mine too. I failed out of college too. I was a Management Information Systems major and limped along with a 1.82 GPA before I got tossed from The University of Mississippi in 1999. Fast forward a few years, in 2002 I went back to school at Benedictine University in Lisle Illinois to study Computer Science.

Next week I’ll be speaking at TechMentor in Redmond, I’m doing a 1/2 day workshop on Linux OS Fundamentals for the Windows Admin be sure to come see me! If you’re there on Monday night (August 7th) and let’s get together for dinner! We’ll talk tech and hopefully make a few new friends and networking connections! Where – We’ll start at the Hyatt Regency Bellevue, light appetizers will be provided. Then we’ll head on over to Lot No.

I’ll be speaking at TechMentor, August 7-11 at Microsoft HQ in Redmond. Surrounded by your fellow IT professionals, TechMentor provides you with in-depth, immediately usable training that will keep you relevant in the workforce. I’ll be presenting the following session: Workshop: Linux OS Fundamentals for the Windows Admin – this will be a fun session getting you started on your road to Linux proficiency, we’ll install Linux together and work through things like command line syntax, building complex commands with pipeline, performance basics and package management.

I’m very pleased to announce that I will be speaking at PASS Summit 2017! This is my first time speaking at PASS Summit and I’m very excited to be doing so! What’s more, is I get to help blaze new ground on a emerging technology SQL Server on Linux! My session is “Monitoring Linux Performance for the SQL Server Admin” so if you’re a Windows or SQL Server administrator, this session is for you.

This past year has certainly been interesting in the world of Linux. Microsoft has taken a new strategy and is embracing the open source model. It’s releasing it’s key software products with versions for Linux. It’s truly a remarkable time. In this post I want to highlight some of the bigger events and cover what does this mean to you and where you can go do get some training on these topics.

Speaking at SQLSaturday Sacramento! I’m proud to announce that I will be speaking at SQL Saturday Sacramento on July 15th 2017! And wow, 650 SQLSaturdays! This one won’t let you down. Check out the amazing schedule! <p> If you don’t know what SQLSaturday is, it’s a whole day of free SQL Server training available to you at no cost! </p> <p> If you haven’t been to a SQLSaturday, what are you waiting for!

With SQL Server on Linux, Microsoft has recognized that they’re opening up their products to a new set of users. People that aren’t used to Windows and it’s tools. In the Linux world we have a set of tools that work with our system performance data and present that to us as text. Specifically, the placeholder for nearly all of the Linux kernel’s performance and configuration data is the /proc virtual file system, procfs.