Each month I look forward to T-SQL Tuesday week when there is a blog party. This is the brainchild of Adam Machanic (Blog|Twitter), and is usually hosted by a different person each month. I hosted December 2010, and that was probably the first time I wrote a post more than a day before the post date. It seems more people

This month Pat Wright chose the topic of Automation, leaving it simply as that word to inspire people. His summary showed that 34 people participated and left trackbacks on his blog. I read through a number of them, and was struck that this month is seemed that people interpreted the topic very differently.

You might expect that many people talked about SQL Agent, and they did, but there were some fascinating thoughts on how automation impacts an environment. Jason Bacani talked about data driven subcriptions in SSRS, which many people might not be aware of. These solve the problem of deliverying reports automatically to people, but in this case, the reports were not working. A little automation solves the problem and keeps the business running. Ted Krueger helps the DBA out by giving us a script to remove NOLOCK from code. An interesting way to enforce the rules that you might want to have in your environment. Grant Fritchey talks about keeping server side traces running all the time with a little automation to manage the process.

There are a variety of other techniques, including getting a testing environment setup with Powershell. These ideas are inspiring, and they are the reason that I think events like T-SQL Tuesday are a great idea. They make me think widely, and re-examine the tools that I have with SQL Server, and how I might deploy those tools in a new way.

Check out T-SQL Tuesday next month, and contact Adam if you're interested in hosting one in the future.

Steve Jones