On Monday, October 1st, 2018 I was awarded the Cloud and Datacenter Management MVP award.

I did not know about it until a few days after because I was busy renovating my office. During the renovation, I did not regularly check my e-mail and the notification slipped through the cracks.

Two days later at 6 AM, I checked my e-mail and jumped up. I saw an email that started “Congratulation…” from the MVP Global Administrator. I got the MVP award.

This month’s TSQL Tuesday is hosted by Bert Wagner (w | t) and he asks us to write about code you’ve written that you would hate to live without.

Over the years I’ve used other people’s code regularly. It could have gone from Github, Stack Overflow, blogs, etc.

I have always appreciated the way the SQL Server community (and other communities) share their code to help others.

I have worked alongside lots of people who were not very keen on sharing. People told me that their code was theirs and only theirs and that nobody is to see it. Although I don’t agree, I do understand people not wanting to share their code. They may have worked hard on it and the person could have an advantage over other people who don’t have that “special” piece of code. There is a couple of caveats to that:

I’ve been working on the dbatools project for a while now and I felt like telling you why I love this project.

A little background about me, I’m not a full-time programmer. I learned to program with Java years ago and did little personal projects with PHP, C#, and a couple of other languages. I started PowerShell about 7 years ago and thought I was capable of delivering solid code. That all changed with dbatools.

As a DBA one of the jobs is making sure all the databases and database servers are working properly and you have a controlled environment.

Once in a while, you have a skeleton in the closet where suddenly a database server comes around and you’re scratching your head where it came from. Your manager (and maybe your colleagues) expect you to support it because you’re the DBA.

You don’t know the server, your colleague doesn’t (really) know the server. So now what. Are you going to take responsibility for everything on the database server of the database itself when you don’t know anything about it?

I know I should have posted this a long time ago but I have the same excuses as everybody, work, too busy, kids, wife, etc, etc, etc ;) .

Last year I entered the contest for the worst day of DBA’s life from Simple-Talk.

The prize was a ticket to the SQL Cruise in the Mediterranean. That sounded good and I started thinking if I had a really bad day in the past. It took me a while to choose which one because there were a lot of winners in my mind. I sat down one evening and started to write my story and it got quite long at the end.