When one of your DBA colleagues leaves the company, what is your checklist? (2020-09-29)

 SQLServerCentral Newsletter for September 29, 2020 Problems displaying this newsletter? [View online](. [SQL Server Central]( Featured Contents - [When one of your DBA colleagues leaves the company, what is your checklist?]( - [Running Container Workloads in Microsoft Azure]( - [How SQL Prompt Improves SQL Server Database Development]( - [From the SQL Server Central Blogs - Azure Synapse Analytics overlooked features]( - [From the SQL Server Central Blogs - Power BI Monthly Digest – September 2020]( Question of the Day - [Backing up to Azure]( [Redgate University]( The Voice of the DBA  Daily Coping Tip Look at photos from a time with happy memories I also have [a thread at SQLServerCentral]( dealing with coping mechanisms and resources. Feel free to participate. For many of you out there working in a new way, I'm including a thought of the day on how to cope in this challenging time from [The Action for Happiness Coping Calendar](. My items will be on [my blog](, feel free to share yours. Keeping Your Staff The nature of work in technology is that most of us will have multiple jobs in our careers. A few lucky ones might stick with one company for a long time, but I don't meet that many people who have worked for one employer for over a decade. I have, which is still surprising to me, and I hope I continue to do so for another decade, however, that's a rarity. For employers, this means regular work to find, evaluate, and hire new staff. That's apart from the training time and resources required to ensure someone becomes productive in their new role. Employers find hiring to be expensive, and many would like to retain as much of their staff as they can. I know many don't really follow through on actions that retain staff, but most want to keep people. How can you do that? And really, what percentage of people do you want to keep around? It's easy to say everyone, but is that what you want? [This post]( talks about how to keep your best programmers, as well as some of the potential issues with long term employees. There's a link to [this post](, which discusses the dead-sea effect, or the tendency of very mediocre staff to remain at a job for a long time. Most of us don't work for companies doing exciting and cutting edge work. Managing ride share data at scale, as Uber does, or dealing with the streaming data scales that can be exciting in some financial firms, or even building cool products that the world is talking about at Apple. That doesn't imply that we don't do useful or interesting work, but the first post about keeping engineers notes that they need to be excited and interested in the work. Sure, free coffee and perks matter, salary is important, but not being bored, and not being frustrated by others is key. I know I've left jobs when I wanted to be more stimulated. That's not always the case, and certainly some people settle into jobs and continue to do great work for years. Some people are happy to do a job very well and get their stimulation, their drive and purpose, outside of work. Finding them, and keeping them is hard. Retaining staff is hard, and I do think it takes some work. I also think it can be important to let some staff go over time. Paying superstars more and more, or letting them dictate their own work isn't a good long term solution. Keeping someone around because it's easy may not be good as well. There's a balance to be struck here. We don't want the [stacked ranking and constant competition](~:text=Stack%2520ranking%2520is%2520a%2520practice%2Cimprovement%2520plans%25E2%2580%259D%2520or%2520fired%2520straightaway.&text=Stack%2520ranking%2520can%2520work%2520well%2Conly%2520when%2520it%27s%2520applied%2520temporarily.) some companies have used, and we don't want to just treat people as disposable, replaceable resources. Good management should work to retain people, develop programs to ensure we can hire and train people well, admit bad decisions and let people go if they aren't working out, and also allow superstars to move on when it's a good fit for them to do so. My view of this is that we want a diverse set of people, looking at problems from different perspectives, but working well together to share knowledge, inspire each other, and hold each other accountable. We want a matrix more than a hierarchy, and we look to embrace their [drive]( and keep them around as long as we feel there are lots of mutual benefits. Steve Jones - SSC Editor [Join the debate, and respond to today's editorial on the forums]( [Redgate SQL Prompt](   Featured Contents [When one of your DBA colleagues leaves the company, what is your checklist?]( Cláudio Silva from SQLServerCentral A colleague left the company, a couple of days after SQL Server processes start failing...what do you do? [Running Container Workloads in Microsoft Azure]( Additional Articles from SimpleTalk Containers are being used by more and more organizations to automate build pipelines in their CICD processes. In this article, Mahendran Purushothaman shows how to automate the creation of Docker containers and a Kubernetes cluster in Azure. [How SQL Prompt Improves SQL Server Database Development]( Additional Articles from Redgate While everyone knows SQL Prompt for its code completion and IntelliSense features, a lot of its extra value comes from features that allow the development team to standardize coding practices and drive up code quality. From the SQL Server Central Blogs - [Azure Synapse Analytics overlooked features]( James Serra from James Serra's Blog There are some options in Azure Synapse Analytics that are not obvious that I wanted to point out. While in Azure Synapse Studio, going to the Data hub and... From the SQL Server Central Blogs - [Power BI Monthly Digest – September 2020]( Devin Knight from Devin Knight In this month’s Power BI Digest Matt and I will again guide you through some of the latest and greatest Power BI updates this month.   Question of the Day Today's question (by Steve Jones - SSC Editor):  Backing up to Azure I want to send the backup of my SQL Server 2019 database to Azure Blob storage. When I enter the URL, what is the format? All CAPS are the items I set for my account. Think you know the answer? [Click here]( and find out if you are right.    Yesterday's Question of the Day (by Steve Jones - SSC Editor) Limiting Access on Startup I want to limit access to the SQL Server on startup to just sqlcmd. How can I do this? Answer: Use the -m startup option with SQLCMD as the value (-mSQLCMD) Explanation: The -m option allows you to limit access to an application. The value for -m is case sensitive. Ref: Database Engine Startup Options - [Discuss this question and answer on the forums](    Database Pros Who Need Your Help Here's a few of the new posts today on the forums. To see more, [visit the forums](. --------------------------------------------------------------- SQL Server 2017 - Administration [Inserts not propagated in transactional replication]( - Hello, I have a transactional replication configured which subscription fails to sync to often due to 20598 errors. I've enabled verbose logging on the Distribution agent, nothing more detailed captured than the message that the UPDATE fails due to the row missing at the Subscriber. I've run profiler on the Subscriber side and verified that very often […] [Key Lookup to Clustered Index]( - Hey all, Been a bit since I've been down this road. Clearly I'd assume this is as expected and I'm just old and rusty. Attached is the execution plan I'm looking at. I have an index seek happening with a key lookup. The key lookup is happening on the clustered index. I attempted to add […] [Restart SQL server from CMD]( - We have a issue in SQL Server 2017 (RTM-CU21) with SSISDB when a server restart happens SQL server will go into a stopped state and I cannot restart it from the configuration manager have to run the following command from cmd to start the service Net Start MSSQLSERVER /T902  how can I make this […] [Replication issue]( - my table is getting replicated from server 1 to server 2. I got a request to delete the records in table in server 1 and insert new set of records. does replication take care of the records in server 2 or should i do something to make both in sync. SQL Server 2017 - Development [Cross Apply, sub query or something else.... I\'m stuck]( - need help on a query please. given the following table; CREATE TABLE #T (CATEGORY bigint, NESTEDSETLEFT bigint, NESTEDSETRIGHT BIGINT) INSERT INTO #T ( CATEGORY, NESTEDSETLEFT, NESTEDSETRIGHT ) SELECT 5637145852,1526,1541 UNION SELECT 5637145310,392,407 UNION SELECT 5637145515,814,837 I need to be able to pass NESTEDSETLEFT and NESTEDSETRIGHT into this query without using a cursor.... SELECT CATEGORY, ITEMID […] SQL Server 2016 - Administration [Linked Server Modification]( - I have a linked server and need to change only the @svrproduct and the @datasrc. I cannot figure out how to do this. I do not want to drop the object and recreate. @server = N'EAUTO', @srvproduct=N'1.2.3.4', @provider=N'SQLNCLI', @datasrc=N'1.2.3.4' Thanks, Terry [SCOM/SCCM alert when Always On High Availability dashboard is green]( - Hello experts, Does anyone know why SCOM (or is it SCCM?) would send the following alert when everything is OK and green in the Always On High Availability > Show Dashboard? The Metric is: Microsoft.SQLServer.Windows.Monitor.Database.DBStatus (UnitMonitor) MSSQL on Windows: Database is in offline/recovery pending/suspect/emergency state The databases in each AG are also online and […] SQL Server 2016 - Development and T-SQL [Storing File in SQL database - Best option]( - What do I tell a .net developer is the best approach for storing various file type in a SQL db? PDF, TIF, JPG... Administration - SQL Server 2014 [Migration of Server]( - We are looking to move the SQL server to different datacenter. Since it's a standalone instance so it can be moved using V2V or other different options. However, the IP address might change after the move? I am thinking changing from configuration manager would be suffice the IP Address Listened by the SQL Server. Do […] SQL Server 2019 - Development [Size of table]( - Hi This probably a silly question but..... If I query the size of a table and it shows 20 gigs in size, when I do a select * from that table from another server will I bring back 20 gigs over the network? thanks in advance [Validate field in STaging before loading]( - I have a STaging table where I have defined all fields as Varchar(255), now I'm trying to load the Prod table, and one of my fields(order_open_qty) is defined as Decimal(18,10), but it fails as data from STaging fails converting Varchar to Dec. Is there any pre-validation I can run to change those bad records to […] Reporting Services [SSRS and SharePoint]( - We currently have SSRS 2017 and are looking at adding SharePoint to our environment. The question has come up as to whether we should implement SharePoint with Reporting Services or without and keep our SSRS 2017 separate as it is. I'm just starting out with Reporting Services and have no experience with SharePoint. I'm not […] [SSRS Query Designer not showing newly added measures]( - We have recently added new measures to our existing cube (that was originally developed in SSAS 2012 and then we stood up SSAS 2019) in dev and test. When I go into my SSRS project using VS 2015, then the query designer and refresh my connection to SSAS 2019, the measures that were developed in […] Analysis Services [Azure Log Analytics or SQL Profiler for AAS?]( - I think you can use both SQL Server Profiler or Azure Log Analytics for Azure Analysis Services logging. But which one is the better option? Integration Services [Running SSIS package on Always On and getting error]( - Hello, so My ssis Package i created, does 2 things: 1.it first checks if the Table exists, and if not, create it 2.checks if Store procedure exists, if not creates it using a Dynamic tsql statement so far, i made several ssis packages with it including several Execution SQL Task, and works fine, just this […]   [RSS Feed]([Twitter]( This email has been sent to {EMAIL}. To be removed from this list, please click [here](. If you have any problems leaving the list, please contact the webmaster@sqlservercentral.com. This newsletter was sent to you because you signed up at SQLServerCentral.com. ©2019 Redgate Software Ltd, Newnham House, Cambridge Business Park, Cambridge, CB4 0WZ, United Kingdom. All rights reserved. webmaster@sqlservercentral.com  - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -