I was honored to be selected as a speaker for SQLSaturday #341 in Porto, Portugal this weekend, and I had such a great time that I hope to come back next year for SQLSaturday Lisbon or SQLSaturday Porto.
First of all I want to say a huge thank you to everyone who organized and volunteered at this event. You guys did an amazing job and I hope you finally got some sleep after working around the clock for a week! Niko, Paulo, Ivan, Rui, André, Pedro, Vitor, Quilson and Nuno - thank you. I also want to thank Ines for being our photographer, she was running around everywhere all day taking pictures and filming. I can’t wait to see the result! 😃
SQLSaturday #341 Porto Speakers and Organizers
This was a very special and memorable weekend for me. It was my first trip to Portugal and the first time I was selected as a speaker for a SQLSaturday other than my own event. It was a very different experience being there as a speaker compared to being an attendee, volunteer or organizer. As an attendee and volunteer I want to learn as much as possible and help out where needed, as an organizer I’m in the middle of a crazy whirlwind trying to remember everything I need to do, and as a speaker I have one main goal: that the attendees in my session will learn something they can start using in their projects right away.
Spoiler alert! Column editing is super simple in Notepad++ 🤓 All you have to do is press the Alt key while selecting text. You can use either Alt+Mouse Dragging or Alt+Shift+Arrows. This works perfectly on text that is already aligned. But what if your text is not formatted as columns already? You can quickly fix that by using the TextFX plugin.
T-SQL Tuesday #57 is hosted by Jeffrey Verheul (@DevJef) and the topic is #SQLFamily. This is a topic close to my heart and even while writing this I’m all excited to read other stories. I can go on for ages about #SQLFamily, but I’ve decided to focus on one thing: pay it forward.
One year ago I had never heard about #SQLFamily and I didn’t even know the SQL community existed. I knew people wrote blogs and forum posts, I knew some taught classes and others published books, but I was your average employee: I did my job, learned what I had to learn to do my job well, and searched online to find solutions and better ways to do things.
Then I went to PASS Summit 2013 and the experience turned my life upside-down.
When Boris (@brshristov) invited me to a SQLHangout I was really honored and couldn’t say no. It’s such a fun idea and I’ve really enjoyed watching the other SQLHangouts. It’s great to see people’s personalities shine through in videos instead of only reading their blog posts, and I learn something new.
I suggested to chat about Biml, something I’ve only recently begun learning myself that has already saved me many hours of work. I still have so much to learn, but the fact that it took me about 20 hours to learn something new that has saved me and my coworkers hundreds of hours already… That’s worth sharing. If I can do it, you can do it!
Boris named the video “Biml. An introduction.” I thought a more appropriate name was “Blabbering about Biml” 🤓
(“Oh hi!”)
I forgot to mention their names, but thank you to Julie Smith (@JulieChix) and André Kamman (@AndreKamman) for inspiring me to learn more Biml in their SQLSaturday sessions in Tampa and Copenhagen! 😊
At work we wanted to start using Biml to speed up development in our existing projects without making too many changes at once. I decided to start by writing Biml files that generates SSIS packages exactly like the ones we already have so we can implement changes faster, and step one was to figure out how to create Package Configurations and Connection Managers in Biml:
Create an XML configuration file Package Configuration
Create the Connection Manager specified in the XML configuration file
Create SQL Server Package Configurations that use the Connection Manager specified in the XML configuration file
Create Connection Managers specified in the [SSIS Configurations] table in SQL Server
