Our IT manager at work called me with a question recently about backing up SQL Server to multiple locations via a single backup command. We have Standard edition so it turns out my answer was accurate when I told him I didn’t think it was possible, but I later found out this is a feature in Enterprise edition. A basic database backup statement to one location looks like this, and we can use this in any edition of SQL Server.

If you’ve ever used the Template Explorer Ctrl+Alt+T in SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS), then you may already be familiar with the concept of parameterized scripts in SSMS. You can use Ctrl+Shift+M to replace parameterized values in the template with your own values. You can also create your own parameterized values in SQL scripts that you may have. The parameters are enclosed in angle brackets and have three values like so.

Windows 10 has two types of startup folders, one for all users and one for each individual user. There are a number of ways to access the folders. The following are how I tend to access them, but I do it infrequently enough that I usually have to look it up so I’m creating that resource for my easy reference now. The all users startup folder can be found here:

Jupyter Notebooks are a tool that can be used for ETL, data visualization, machine learning, statistical modeling and more. They can also be used for simply testing out little snippets of code. There are multiple ways that one could install Jupyter Notebooks. This is just one of the ways. Install Python Go to https://www.python.org/downloads Get the latest version and install it. Install Jupyter Open a command prompt 1 pip install jupyter Creating your first notebook When the installation is complete, at the command prompt type:

There are times when you want to measure how long some piece of code takes to execute or compare it to another piece of code to decide if one is faster than the other. There are plenty of options for measuring how long a command takes to execute. Here I’ll show an example in PowerShell using the Measure-Command cmdlet. 1 2 $duration = Measure-Command -Expression { $result = Get-ChildItem -Path "$env:userprofile\Documents\*.