I’m excited to announce that I have been named a Friend of Redgate for 2017. The program targets influential people in their respective technical communities such as SQL, .NET and ALM and enables us to participate in the conversation around product and community development. As a multi-year awardee in the program I get to see first hand the continuing dedication Redgate has to the SQL community and to making great software.

Proactive Reporting for SQL Server If you’re a return reader of this blog you know I write often about monitoring and performance of Availability Groups. I’m a very big proponent of using monitoring techniques to ensure you’re meeting your service level agreements in terms of recovery time objective and recovery point objective. In my in person training sessions on “Performance Monitoring AlwaysOn Availability Groups”, I emphasize the need for knowing what your system’s baseline for healthy replication and knowing when your system deviates from that baseline.

This month I’ll be speaking to the PowerShell Virtual Chapter of PASS. The session is on Linux OS Fundamentals for the SQL Admin. At the core of the session we will introduce you to OS concepts like managing files and file systems, installation packages, using PowerShell on Linux, managing system services, commands and processes and system resource management. This session is intended for those who have never seen or have very little exposure to Linux but are seasoned Windows or SQL administrators.

This week we started our Centino Systems weekly newsletter. Check out the first edition here! The newsletter is going to include the latest in SQL Server and other things in technology that I think are important or interesting…and maybe you will too! So if you’d like to subscribe to the newsletter go ahead and sign up here!

My new course “LFCE: Advanced Network and System Administration” 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.

When designing Availability Group systems one of the first pieces of information I ask clients for is how much transaction log their databases generate. *Roughly*, this is going to account for how much data needs to move between their Availability Group Replicas. With that number we can start working towards the infrastructure requirements for their Availability Group system. I do this because I want to ensure the network has a sufficient amount of bandwidth to move the transaction log generated between all the replicas .

Today, I’m proud to announce that I have been named a Microsoft MVP – Data Platform. This is an exceptional honor and I’m humbled to be included in this group of exceptional data professionals. I really look forward to working with everyone in the MVP community and continuing to contribute to our unmatched SQL Community! What is an MVP? Here’s the definition according to Microsoft Microsoft Most Valuable Professionals, or MVPs, are technology experts who passionately share their knowledge with the community.

Speaking at SQLSaturday Nashville! I’m proud to announce that I will be speaking at SQL Saturday Nashville on January 14th 2017! This will be my first speaking event this year and I look forward to seeing you there! <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!

OK, so everyone wants to know how Microsoft did it…how they got SQL Server running on Linux. In this article, I’m going to try to figure out how. Update: Since the publication of this post, Microsoft has published a blog post detailing the implementation here. There’s a couple of approaches they could take…a direct port or some abstraction layer…A direct port would have been hard, basically any OS interaction would have had to been looked at and that would have been time consuming and risk prone.

Open Source PowerShell is available on several operating systems, that really what’s special about the whole project! To get PowerShell to function on these various systems we need to build (compile) the software in that environment. This is what will produce the actual executable program that is powershell. To facilitate the build process the PowerShell team has documented how to do this for the currently available platforms, Linux, MacOS and Windows.