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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. Things like how to get started and what to look out for are common themes.  So I wanted to share the some of the discussion points I bring up when I’m having these conversations. In this post I’m going to boil it down to the top 5 “must haves” before you start consulting, there’s certainly more…many books have been written about it!

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. This Play by Play is on “Microsoft Open Source PowerShell – PowerShell on Linux and Mac” and is available now and is FREE! You do not have to be a subscriber!

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. Now lets say the root cause is a poorly performing query, SQLMonitor let’s you find that query pretty easily, but stopped short when it came to diagnosing that actual performance issue in the query.

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?

If you’ve used Availability Groups in production systems with high transaction volumes you know that replication latency can impact your availability. If you want to brush up on that check out our blog posts on AG Replication Latency, Monitoring for replication latency, and issues with the DMVs when monitoring. These new extended events add insight at nearly every point inside your Availability Group’s replication. More importantly they also include duration. So using these Extended Events we can pinpoint latency inside our Availability Group replication.

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. For ages I’ve been a fan of bash.

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 <a href="https://github.com/PowerShell/PowerShell/blob/master/docs/installation/linux.md#ubuntu-1404">this</a>.

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. This is so it can ensure its data is consistent in the event of a system failure. SQL Server uses a logging protocol called write ahead logging (WAL). This means that the data change operations must be written to stable, persistent storage before the process can change data in the database file…so this means our database throughput is at the mercy of the performance of the device the changes (log records) are written to.

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? You’re heard about AlwaysOn Availability Groups and they seem like a good solution, but you don’t know where to start. It all starts with a solid design. In this session we introduce the core concepts needed to design a Availability Group based system. Covering topics such as recovery objectives, replica placement, failover requirements, synchronization models, quorum, backup and recovery and monitoring. This session is modeled after real world client engagements conducted by Centino Systems that have lead to many successful Availability Groups based systems supporting tier 1 business critical applications.

I’m proud to announce that I will be speaking at SQL Saturday Baton Rouge on August 6th 2016! This will be my forth SQLSaturday event this year and I’m really excited that I get to do it as a speaker. I look forward to seeing you there!

If you don’t know what SQL Saturday is, it’s a whole day of free SQL Server training available to you at no cost!