What I'm Up To

Kendra and Malathi Mahadevan before the keynote It’s the second main-session day of the Summit for the Professional Association of SQL Server. I had a great breakfast this morning with Brent Ozar, along with Nathan and James from my first timer group. If you attend Summit for the first time in the future, this is a great program and you should join up. I’m jazzed to follow the keynote this morning. Like yesterday, I’m going to capture the highlights into a slide deck and publish them below. Let’s do this! Highlights… and lowlights So… I didn’t love it today. I have some comments in the slides as to why. As a presenter, and as someone who can influence event organizers, I have a lot to reflect on after today about how we can improve at inspiring people across cultures and genders in an international community. That’s the positive takeaway I…

Kendra at the blogger table with Bob Pusateri and Brent Ozar Good morning from Seattle, at the Summit for the Professional Association of SQL Server. I’m lucky enough to be sitting at the blogger table this morning, watching the keynote of announcements. I’m following along with the keynote and making notes on slides — and I’ll share those slides with you below. Don’t feel like reading or rewatching the presentation? Join me on Tuesday, Nov 20th, with Grant Fritchey and Steve Jones in a webcast to sum up everything we learned at PASS Summit! Register Keynote summary in slides SQL PASS Summit 2018 from KendraLittle2 Text from the slides PASSION award winner: Michael Johnson Rohan Kumar Hybrid cloud is the true enabler for digital transformationAI is helping MS customers Understand their customers and better meet their needsImprove their operationsCritical to build training model on data that spans the hybrid estate…

What if you could assess the performance level of your team by asking one simple question? In his recent webinar with Redgate, Gene Kim (@realgenekim) suggests that you can. In this 30 minute session, I discuss three insights from the recent ‘Gene Kim joins Redgate to discuss The 2018 Accelerate State of DevOps Report’ webinar (recording). I also dig into why these insights make a compelling argument for modifying your organization’s change control process. Key Insights from Gene Kim that I discuss in the session The question, “To what degree do we fear doing deployments?” on a scale of 1 to 7, is a simple way to measure whether or not your company is a high performer Although database operations has been a high-spend area for a long time, it has been comparatively impoverished in most organizations when it comes to tooling and automation, as compared to other areas of…

I was lucky to get an opportunity to present a session to some college students at Seminole State College in Florida last week. I was in town for SQL Saturday Orlando– a fantastic event on its own. The organizers run a simultaneous seminar for students at the college studying software development and IT topics, and it’s an opportunity where they can hear from professionals in IT professions. I gave a session on interviewing best practices. The students were a terrific audience, and I really enjoyed speaking. The slides I shared that day are here: Interviewing for your first tech jobDownload

I recently set up Redgate’s SQL Change Automation in Visual Studio 2017, and I ran into a confusing error when I started trying to use it. For any other folks out there searching on “Unknown SQL Server Platform,” here’s how I got past it. Spoiler: Visual Studio suggested updating Microsoft’s SQL Server Data Tools, which failed for me and wasted a lot of time. Updating Visual Studio did fix my issue. The basics on my setup When I installed Visual Studio 2017, I selected the ‘Data storage and processing’ workload, which contains SQL Server Data tools as well as some of the Redgate tools: Visual Studio 2017 workloads I used the default checkboxes on the right there, installing everything except F# desktop language support. First, I created a new project In the ‘SQL Change Automation’ window, I clicked ‘Create Project’, selected ‘SQL Change Automation Project’ and gave it a name, and click…

Every now and again, someone asks if I write romance novels. Why? Well, let’s ask Bing who Kendra Little is…. To clarify,  I am not married, I have dogs instead of children, and I prefer romances about strong women who bring SQL Servers to their knees. I also don’t think it’s possible to drink too much coffee. Most of those pictures are of me, but a careful reader will note that the biography at the top references a domain name that, sadly, dear reader, I do not own. Someone out there named Kendra Little gets sweet royalties from her contemporary romance novels, but they don’t come to this address. I helped Malathi Mahadevan write a different kind of book ‘Data Professionals at Work’ is a new book by Malathi Mahadevan. Mala went out and interviewed loads of data professionals, and talked with us about topics like: How to stand out…