Open Source PowerShell has been on fire, getting tons of community support and really making people think about what’s to come with a single language to manage a heterogenous data center. To highlight this point, in my recent Pluralsight Play By Play Microsoft Open Source PowerShell on Linux and Mac with Jason Helmick and Jeffrey Snover I did a demo on using PowerShell remoting where I connected from a Linux machine to three other machines and retrieved lists of top processes from each…two Linux and one Windows.

Please join me at IT/Dev Connections on Oct. 12 at 8:00AM where I’ll be hosting a Birds of a Feather session “Moving to Independent Consulting” Bring your questions!* Yes, an 8:00AM session in Las Vegas, but if you’re serious about going out on your own…you’ll already be up :)* The most common questions I’m asked during networking sessions at technical conferences and events aren’t technical! People want to know what it’s like being an independent consultant.

What’s going on here? So last week you may have seen this picture on Twitter…it went a little crazy…and you may have been wondering what are we up to? Well, last week I had the pleasure of filming a Pluralsight Play By Play. A Play By Play is a course on Pluralsight but in a slightly different format than you may be used to. A Play By Play bring together industry experts to discuss and demonstrate an emerging technology.

The SQLMonitor team at Redgate has been releasing updates at a much more rapid rate…what’s this mean to you? More fixes and more features. In this latest release, they certainly added something special…Graphical Query Plans! Yes, right inside of SQLMonitor’s user interface. Why is this important? Well for me, when I’m troubleshooting a performance issue…I usually start with identifying what system resource is being taxed and try to zoom in from there on the root cause.

SQL 2014 Service Pack 2 was recently released by Microsoft and there is a ton of great new features and enhancements in this release.This isn’t just a collection of bug fixes…there’s some serious value in this Service Pack. Check out the full list here. One of the key things added in this Service Pack is an enhancement of the Extended Events for AlwaysOn Availability Group replication. Why are the new Availability Group Extended Event interesting?

In this post we’re going set PowerShell as your default Linux shell. What is a shell? In Linux systems you’re given options, tons of options, you can set, reconfigure, add/remove almost anything that you want. And one of those options is your shell. The shell is the thing that you interact with when you’re typing commands at the command line. Different shells have different behaviors and characteristics. It’s a very personal choice.

Getting PowerShell on Linux Well it’s not just an announcement, you can actually get PowerShell on Linux and MacOS right now from GitHub – here! Installing PowerShell Once you’ve downloaded an installation file you can use RPM or apt to install the package. If you’re on a Mac…well just double click on the package! yum install powershell-6.0.0_alpha.9-1.el7.centos.x86_64.rpm If you’re on Ubuntu, you’ll need a little more stuff read this. Running PowerShell We’ll there’s really not much to that, just type powershell at the command prompt an you’re off and running!

Paradigm Shift! What do I mean by that? Every once in a while a technology comes along and changes the way things are done, moves the bar…well last week Microsoft released a Channel 9 video on persistent memory using NVDIMMs and DAX on Windows 2016…then combining it with SQL Server! This is one of those technologies that moves the bar! Check it out here. Why is this important? Relational databases like SQL Server use a transaction log to ensure the durability of the transactional operations to the database.

My new course “LFCE: Advanced Linux Networking” in now available on Pluralsight here! This course targets IT professionals that design and maintain RHEL 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 The course can be used by both the IT pro learning new skills and the senior system administrator preparing for the certification exam

I’m proud to announce that I will be speaking at IT/Dev Connections on October 11th 2016 in Las Vegas! I can’t begin to tell you how excited I am to be able to speak at this conference! I look forward to seeing you there! Here’s the information on the talk! Designing High Availability Database Systems using AlwaysOn Availability Groups **Track: **Development Platform Tools and Devops Abstract: Are you looking for a high availability solution for your business critical application?