Books in Review - 2017

One of my personal goal for 2017 was to read more books. I was gunning to read 2 books a month. In 2017, I read 25 books (1 more book than the yearly target goal). I am not a fast reader. Normally, I read books when I commute to and from work. Most of the books were rented from local library. I used to prefer hard copy books than digital books. However, a couple of years ago, for non technical books, I made the transition to get digital (Kindle) books whenever possible. It felt awkward at first, but after reading several books on my kindle, I am starting to get used to it. The good thing is that my local library also has a good selection of books in digital format. Since 2017 has just ended, I think it would be good to inventory the books that I've read in 2017. It seems that I read various genres of books from fiction, self-help, autobiography, etc.

PASS Summit Video Recordings

PASS (Professional Association for SQL Server) Summit is the largest conference for data professional working with Microsoft SQL Server and Business Intelligence stack. Typically, PASS would have the Summit once a year (in the fall) in Seattle, Washington. PASS Summit offers a wealth of knowledge. Each year, there are hundreds of sessions on various SQL Server and Business Intelligence topics presented by industry experts and also Microsoft employees. If you are a data professional, who are working with Microsoft SQL Server and Business Intelligence, PASS Summit is a great event to learn and network with fellow data professionals. If you were unable to attend the past PASS Summits (or if you attended the past PASS Summits and want to relive and review those sessions), you can go to SQL PASS site and watch the past PASS Summit Session Recordings for free. As of the writing of this blog post, you can view recordings for PASS Summit 2015 and older for free (you need to be a member of SQL PASS but the registration is free). Even though they might be a few years old, they are excellent learning resources.

By the way, if you can attend PASS Summit in person, I would recommend it. PASS Summit 2018 is going to be in Seattle, Washington, in November 2018. You can get more information from PASS Summit 2018 site.

T-SQL Tuesday #97 - 2018 Learning Goals

This month T-SQL Tuesday is hosted by Malathi Mahadevan (blog | twitter) and it is about 2018 learning goals. Given that we are at the end of 2017, this is a timely topic. As data professionals and technology enthusiasts, we are living in an interesting time. There are a lot of opportunities to learn, so much so that we might feel overwhelmed by them. Goals can certainly help to focus our learning efforts.

Backup Analysis Services Database Using PowerShell

We can use PowerShell to backup Analysis Services (AS) multidimensional or tabular database. This is great because it offers us more flexibility in automating the AS database backup process. Typically, we might have multiple Analysis Service databases within an Analysis Services instance. As a good Database Administrator responsible for the Analysis Services, we want to backup all those Analysis Services databases.

Remove Log Shipping When Secondary Server Not Available

The other day, I came accross a scenario where I need to remove log shipping from a database on the primary server. However, we have already shutdown/decommissioned the secondary server. If we try to disable the log shipping from the database properties window, we would most like get the following: