T-SQL Tuesday #135: The outstanding tools of the trade that make your job awesome

Welcome to T-SQL Tuesday, the brainchild of Adam Machanic ( twitter ) and ward of Steve Jones ( blog | twitter ).
T-SQL Tuesday is a monthly blogging party where a topic gets assigned and all wishing to enter write about the subject.
This month we have Mikey Bronowski ( blog | twitter ) asking us about the most helpful and useful tools we know of or use.

Tools of the trade are a topic that I enjoy. I have a (sadly unmaintained) list of scripts from various community members on my blog. This list is not what I’m going to talk about though. I’m going to talk about what to do with or any scripts.

I want to talk about you as a person and as a community member. Why? Because you are the master of your craft and a master of their craft takes care of their tools.

Store Them

If you are using scripts, community-made or self-made, then you should store them properly. By properly, I’m talking source control. Have your tools in a centralised place where those who need it can access it. Have your scripts in a centralised place where everyone gets the same changes applied to them, where you can roll back unwanted changes.

Check out Brett Miller’s ( blog | twitter ) presentation “GitOps – Git for Ops people“.

Version Them

If you are using community scripts, then more likely than not, they are versioned. That way you’re able to see when you need to update to the newest version. No matter what language you’re using, you can add a version to them.

PowerShell has a ModuleVersion number, Python has __version__, and SQL has extended properties.

Or even take a page out of Bret Wagner’s ( blog | twitter ) book and try XML comments.

Take Care of Them

If you take care of these tools, if you store them, version them, and make them accessible to those who need them, then they will pay you back a hundredfold.
You’ll no longer need to re-write the wheel or pay the time penalty for composing them. The tools will be easy to share and self-documented for any new hires.
Like the adage says: Take care of your tools and your tools will take care of you.