T-SQL Tuesday 157 – End of Year Activity

Words: 544

Time to read: ~ 2 minutes

Read-Clipboard

Welcome to T-SQL Tuesday, the monthly blog part where we are given a topic and asked to blog about it. This month we have Garry Bargsley, asking us to discuss end-of-year activities.

Here

My current workplace has a change freeze in place for the end of the year. Usually, I would say that this is risk-averse.
But seeing as the nature of the business (payments) means that the Thanksgiving/Black Friday/Christmas time is the busiest time of the year, I’m willing to cut them some slack.

So, what to do when we cannot deploy to production? Oh, we’ll still be busy! There are always management-approved fixes that get through, annual processes to complete, and project planning that has to be…well, planned.

But, my priority for this end-of-year is documentation.

Docs

We have a few different tools for documentation. Examples are Confluence, Google Sheets, Google Docs, etc.

But most of the time, documentation takes the form of scripts saved to source control.

These scripts are multiprocess and cross-team dependent and can quickly end up like me doing DIY. One hand trying to steady the nail, the other wielding the hammer, and the whole situation collapsing into swear words and tears.

We can’t currently have a “hit-Enter-and-leave-it” bunch of scripts because we have to stop midway for another team’s work or to check the results of what we’ve just run.

Notebooks

If we used Notebooks, this would be so much easier. I could create the code, save a snippet of the results to the notebooks, and then future executors could see what to expect.

No-books

We don’t use Notebooks.

Plain .sql files for me, it is!

To ease the documentation burden and have some semblance of tidiness, I created a PowerShell tool that splits it out “all pretty like”.

Format-TextTable

Now, with a combination of Read-Clipboard from the ImportExcel module, I can grab results and turn them into a text table that I can add back into the script.

Simple example: we want to save the database name, create date, and compatibility level of the databases on an instance.

… I said simple example – not good or useful example.

SELECT 
	database_name = name,
	create_date,
	compatibility_level
FROM sys.databases;

Picture shows an SSMS screen selecting name, create_date, and compatibility level from sys.databases. Returning 5 rows

Now, let’s copy and paste the results into a comment on that script as a form of “documentation”.

Picture shows an SSMS screen selecting name, create_date, and compatibility level from sys.databases. Returning 5 rows. Underneath the query in a comment are the pasted results that all have different spacing and are not aligned

Now, this time I’m going to copy those results, and run the following code in my PowerShell Core window, before pasting into the comment block.

Read-Clipboard | Format-TextTable | Set-Clipboard

Given the option, I know which one I’d choose.

Code

You can pick up the source-code here.

Feel free to check it out and add/remove from it.

Set-Clipboard

I am aware that I could spend minutes of my time to evenly align the spaces. And, yes, I know that SSMS can do find-and-replace using simple Regex.
But if I manually structure the output every time, for all different types of columns & data types, with different spacings…

I’d be better off arguing with the company to start using Notebooks.

Until then, this works for me. Hopefully, it will work for you.

And hey, maybe it will help improve your documentation in the New Year. That has a higher chance of happening than my one to improve my DIY skills.

Splitting Functions from Scripts in bulk

Time to read: 2.5 minutes

Words: 504

Previously on…

I’ve talked before about a couple of topics that this blog post pertains to

Pester Testing Self Contained Scripts introduced Chris Dent’s function Get-FunctionInfo
Pester showed me a bug in our existing build process. Can you find it? and Dot Sourcing with PSScriptRoot talked about how I was splitting out functions from our monolithic build scripts.

That is the relevant information so you’re up to speed on where I am.

Bring on the stupid

The stupid thing that I was doing was that I was manually, visually scanning the script, copying out the function definitions, and pasting them into their own function files.

This was long, this was tedious, and this was not a efficient use of my time.

Especially since the scripts were not laid out as logically as I would have liked.

Personally if I were to have nested functions in a script, I would have them towards the beginning of the file. Together, maybe in a little region that I’ve called “functions”.

Actually, if I have to have a “functions” region, then I have too many functions and I’m going to split them out anyway.

The scripts I was looking at were not laid out this way.

Sure there were what appeared to be a function region but there were also functions further down the script, created just before they were needed.

Hence, manually scanning the whole script, taking a note and a copy of each function before moving on again.

Long, tedious, wasteful.

There is a way!

Like I mentioned at the start, in the “pertinent” region, Chris Dent has a function that we have availed of before that we can use her.

Let’s take a look at what it gives us…

First of all, we get a list of the build scripts.

Get-ChildItem -Path .\Git\build-scripts\ -Filter *.ps1

So we now have a list of the scripts. Each one of these scripts may, or may not, have one or many functions defined within them.

How are we going to get these?

We pipe this list to our Get-FunctionInfo function.

Get-ChildItem -Path .\Git\build-scripts\ -Filter *.ps1 |
    Get-FunctionInfo -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue -IncludeNested

Perfect! Now to automate the final part of manual process. Can we grab the definition of these functions and split them out to a separate file per function?

First question is can we grab the function definitions?

Get-ChildItem -Path .\Git\build-scripts\ -Filter *.ps1 |
    Get-FunctionInfo -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue -IncludeNested |
 ForEach-Object {
    $_.Scriptblock.Ast.Parent.Extent.Text 
 }

I’m going to ignore that `GetCurrentDateFormat` function

Final bit

Now that we know that we can grab the function definition, it’s a quick step to out the contents into a file.

Get-ChildItem -Path .\Git\build-scripts\ -Filter *.ps1 |
    Get-FunctionInfo -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue -IncludeNested |
 ForEach-Object {
    $_.Scriptblock.Ast.Parent.Extent.Text |
        Out-File -FilePath ".\Git\build-scripts\build\$($_.Name).ps1"
 }

And just to double check…

All the functions are split off into their own .ps1 file where they can be reviewed, tests can be created for them, and/or improved.

It’s nice to push the bottleneck down the pipeline. Now I’m wondering if there’s a way we can bulk introduce Pester tests…

Finding Parameters that do not match Column Names

You think this will take me hours? Ha! Think again.

Words: 437

Time to read: ~ 2 minutes

Script Link: https://github.com/shaneis/RandomScripts/blob/master/WhereParameterNameDoesNotMatchColumnName.ps1

Continue reading “Finding Parameters that do not match Column Names”

ARIGHTABORT-ing & Anti-ANSI_WARNINGS

I recently ran into a problem with the QUOTED_IDENTIFIERS option in SQL Server, and it got me to thinking about these SET options.

I mean the fact that, on tables where there are filtered indexes or computed columns with indexes, QUOTED_IDENTIFIER is required to be on to create any other indexes is just not intuitive. But if you can’t create indexes because of it then I’d argue that it’s pretty damn important! I also found out that this problem is not just limited to QUOTED_IDENTIFIER but to ARITHABORT and ANSI_WARNINGS as well.

Just check out the Microsoft Docs and what it has to say about it:

SET ARITHABORT must be ON when you are creating or changing indexes on computed columns or indexed views. If SET ARITHABORT is OFF, CREATE, UPDATE, INSERT, and DELETE statements on tables with indexes on computed columns or indexed views will fail.

And for ANSI_WARNINGS it says:

SET ANSI_WARNINGS must be ON when you are creating or manipulating indexes on computed columns or indexed views. If SET ANSI_WARNINGS is OFF, CREATE, UPDATE, INSERT, and DELETE statements on tables with indexes on computed columns or indexed views will fail.

It’s not just Indexes

So, like a dog when it sees a squirrel, when I found out about the problems with ARITHABORT and ANSI_WARNINGS I got distracted and started checking out what else I could break with it. Reading through the docs, because I found that it does help even if I have to force myself to do it sometimes, I found a little gem that I wanted to try and replicate. So here’s a reason why you should care about setting ARITHABORT and ANSI_WARNINGS on.

Default to on

At one stage or another if you’re working with SQL Server, you’ve probably encountered the dreaded “Divide By 0” error:

Msg 8134, Level 16, State 1, Line 4
Divide by zero error encountered.

If you want to check this out, then here’s the code below for our table:


USE Pantheon;

-- Create our test table...
CREATE TABLE dbo.ArithAborting (
    id tinyint NULL
);
GO

And our attempt at inserting that value into the table:

SET ARITHABORT ON;
GO
SET ANSI_WARNINGS ON;
GO
-- Check can we insert a &quot;divide by 0&quot;...
BEGIN TRY
INSERT INTO dbo.ArithAborting (id) SELECT 1/0;
END TRY
BEGIN CATCH
  PRINT 'NOPE!';
  THROW;
END CATCH;

And we get our good, old, dreaded friend:

We check our ArithAborting table and nothing is there, like we expected!

SELECT *
FROM dbo.ArithAborting;

What about if we were to turn our ARITHABORT and ANSI_WARNINGS off though, what happens then? Well that’s a simple thing to test, we just turn them off and run the script again:

--Turn ARITHABORT off;
SET ARITHABORT OFF;
GO
SET ANSI_WARNINGS OFF;
GO
-- ...insert into our table...
BEGIN TRY
  INSERT INTO dbo.ArithAborting (id) SELECT 1/0;
END TRY
BEGIN CATCH
  PRINT 'NOPE!';
  THROW;
END CATCH;

Now before I freak out and start thinking that I’ve finally divided by zero, let’s check the table:

What’s going on here? Checking the docs…

During expression evaluation when SET ARITHABORT is OFF, if an INSERT, DELETE or UPDATE statement encounters an arithmetic error, overflow, divide-by-zero, or a domain error, SQL Server inserts or updates a NULL value. If the target column is not nullable, the insert or update action fails and the user receives an error.

Do I like this?

Nope!

If I have a terminating error in my script, I quite like the fact that SQL Server is looking out for me and won’t let me put in bad data, but if you have these options turned off, even if you wrap your code in an TRY...CATCH block, it’s going to bypass it.

Plus if you are trying to divide by 0, please stop trying to break the universe. Thank you.

Exporting Special Characters out of SQL Server using PowerShell.

PowerShell is ußer-useful!

So I’ve talked before about keeping new lines when copying results to a different window in SQL Server and about copying new lines out of SQL Server into reports.

These topics have come about as they are both issues that I’ve had to deal with. Well, another of those issues is dealing with exporting special characters out of SQL Server using PowerShell.

The Lay-out.

We already have our table called “dbo.NewLineNotes” from before when we were trying to copy new lines out of SQL Server so we’re going to add another row.
Now personal experience for me centered around the German Eszett (“ß”) but you may encounter this with other characters.

-- Insert some special characters...
INSERT INTO dbo.NewLineNotes (Notes)
VALUES (N'This is a ß')

Now if you were to use the code from keeping new lines post…

	$NewLineQuery = 'SELECT Notes FROM dbo.NewLineNotes'

	$InvSQLParams = @{
	ServerInstance = '0738-5CG140G7T\SQLSERVER2K16'
	Database = 'Pantheon'
	Query = $NewLineQuery
	}

	Invoke-Sqlcmd @InvSQLParams \|
	Select-Object –Property Notes \|
	Export-Csv –Path 'C:\Users\soneill\Desktop\In Progress\Test\NewLines.csv' –NoTypeInformation

view raw

NewLines_FileOutBasic.ps1

hosted with ❤ by GitHub

and open up the csv file we would get…

EncodingIssue — My german is non-existant but I know that’s wrong!

“What do we do when we fall down?”…

Well with SQL Server, I normally break things down into the smallest parts and slowly build it up until it breaks. For this, it breaks when we get to Export-CSV as everything before it works!

PowerShell is even easier for troubleshooting methodology as , and we’ve talked about it before, Get-Member and Get-Help are there to help us!

We know that it’s Export-CSV that is somehow screwing up our special character so the obvious next step…

help Export-CSV -Full;

And we can see a parameter just shine at us!

So we have to define an “Encoding” do we? I used “UTF8” and modified my query…

	$NewLineQuery = 'SELECT Notes FROM dbo.NewLineNotes'

	$InvSQLParams = @{
	ServerInstance = '0738-5CG140G7T\SQLSERVER2K16'
	Database = 'Pantheon'
	Query = $NewLineQuery
	}

	Invoke-Sqlcmd @InvSQLParams \|
	Select-Object –Property Notes \|
	Export-Csv –Path 'C:\Users\soneill\Desktop\In Progress\Test\NewLines.csv' –NoTypeInformation –Encoding UTF8;

view raw

NewLines_FileOutBasicSpecialChars.ps1

hosted with ❤ by GitHub

EncodingIssueResolved — Eszett? More like EZ-zett!

And special characters are no longer an issue for us 🙂

Chaos Theory, Compound Effects, and Consequences.

Straight away I want to apologise for the Nicolas Cage memes!

User Groups are great, aren’t they?

I just got back from the Reading User Group and I’m still in that post “User Group Glow”, also known as “Long Day Lethargy”, or “Twelve Hour Tiredness”.

They are great though! A chance to talk to other people in the SQL Server community, – a slight reminder that even if you work alone, people are still experiencing some of the same problems that you are (apparently everyone has to deal with multiple nested views, who knew!) – a chance to hear presentations on different topics, and pizza if you’re lucky (we were).

I realised during the session that the two presentations given during the User Group had a connection with a small issue with a table change I had been given with a developer.

Here’s what did not happen to me so you can watch out for it.

The Chaos Theory

Raul Gonzalez ( blog | twitter ) was first up with this presentation “Database Design Matters, Seriously”, showing us the chaos that can occur from not giving some serious thought into how you design your database.

His session is not yet up on his blog as I’m writing this but it will be soon so keep an eye out for that!

Now he had a lot of good points but, for brevity’s sake, the main chaos theory points here are what happens if you don’t take advantage of CHECK CONSTRAINTS, FOREIGN KEY CONSTRAINTS, and not specifying a columns NULLABILITY (yes, that’s a word!). SQL Server is a powerful program with many performance optimizations provided for you, but it’s not omniscient; it can only use the information that you give it!

His points on NULLABILITY (I mean, I think it’s a word) tied in nicely with the next presentation…

Compound Effects

David Morrison ( blog | twitter ) followed up with his presentation on “Query Plan Deep Dives” (I had seen this at SQL Bits, but it’s a great session so I had no problems watching it again) and, as an aside, through his presentation he showed us the compound effects that can happen from not specifying a columns NULLABILITY (it’s got letters so it’s word-like…)

Now his slides and scripts are up on his blog and they do a great job of walking you through them so check them out and you’ll see the compound effects they create!

Here’s a little teaser…


-- now I want all people who's email isn't in the email table
SELECT /*C.FirstName ,
    C.LastName ,*/
    C.EmailAddress
FROM dbo.Contact AS C
WHERE C.EmailAddress NOT IN (SELECT E.EmailAddress
                             FROM dbo.Emails AS E)

GO

Consequences

Which brings us back around to consequences or as I like to put it “How I Pissed Off A Dev By Refusing A Simple Request”.

To be quite honest, it was a simple request. A requirement came in to expand a column datatype up to varchar(100), so one of devs wrote up a simple script and passed it onto the DBAs to check as part of the change control procedure.

ALTER TABLE tablename
ALTER COLUMN columnname varchar(100)

And I said no.

“WHY???!!!“, you may shout at me (he certainly did), but I’m going to say to you what I said to him. “Give me a chance to explain before you take my head off, alright?”

While there is nothing wrong with the above code syntactically (is that a word?) but I couldn’t approve it since that column was originally NOT NULL and the above script would have stripped the column of that attribute! Business requirements dictated that it should not allow NULLS, and hey, who are we to argue with that 😐

Double checking to see if the column is NULL or NOT NULL allowed me to see a problem with that code, one that many people would consider simple enough to just allow it through at a quick glance. Which could have opened up problems further down the line if it had run…

Thanks to the User Group, I now know that it could have a knock on effect with our query plans as well!

ALTER TABLE tablename
ALTER COLUMN columnname varchar(100) NOT NULL

There, that’s better!

DBAs deal with databases and consequences

DBAs get a lot of stick sometime, the “Default Blame Acceptors” or the “Don’t Bother Asking” but a lot of the time, it’s not that we want to say no, it’s just that we have to take into consideration a thousand little things that could snowball into 1 giant problem.

With the rise of DevOps, check out the latest T-SQL Tuesday, DBAs have gone from going

“No”

to somewhere along the lines of

“Not this second, let me check it out and see what we can do”

If pressed further, we may rely on the good, old “it depends” though. Hey, clichés are there for a reason; they work!

It just goes to show that, like the IT profession, DBAs are constantly evolving.
Continuosly learning, checking out new helping technologies, and going to User Groups are going to help us to deal with it.

Just remember, in the end,

P.S. I should probably mention that the Nicolas Cage memes are because of this blog post by Nate Johnson ( blog ) that I enjoyed so much that I had to do something in response. I’m not normally this crazy, I swear!

Keeping New Lines in SQL Server.

Where I compare scripts to BBQ because of course I would 😐

I have this personal opinion that one sign of a good DBA is their ability to automate things and, before the DBA world found PowerShell, the way to do this was with T-SQL.

For example, a T-SQL script to get permissions assigned to a database principal could also include a column to REVOKE those permissions. This could be “automated” with some dynamic SQL.

SELECT dprin.name AS DatabasePrincipalName,
       OBJECT_NAME(dperm.major_id) AS ObjectName,
       dperm.permission_name AS PermissionName,
       N'REVOKE '
         + dperm.permission_name
         + N' ON OBJECT::'
         + OBJECT_NAME(dperm.major_id)
         + N' FROM '
         + dprin.name COLLATE Latin1_General_CI_AS AS RevokeMe
FROM sys.database_permissions AS dperm
INNER JOIN sys.database_principals AS dprin
  ON dperm.grantee_principal_id = dprin.principal_id
WHERE dprin.name = 'public';

RevokePermissions — This can be improved A WHOLE LOT…

What about if we want to improve this?

This is nice but what about if we are ~~paranoid~~ forward-thinking enough to realize that this could cause us problems?

“How?” You ask. Well what happens if there existed another database, say [NeedsAllPermissions], with the same table name and the same login has permissions on it.

Are you going to revoke permissions from that database? It needs ALL of them! It says so in the name!

So in an effort to not shoot ourselves in the foot, we add in the database name to our revoke script.

SELECT dprin.name AS DatabasePrincipalName,
       OBJECT_NAME(dperm.major_id) AS ObjectName,
       dperm.permission_name AS PermissionName,
       N'USE '
         + DB_NAME()
         + 'GO'
         + N'REVOKE '
         + dperm.permission_name
         + N' ON OBJECT::'
         + OBJECT_NAME(dperm.major_id)
         + N' FROM '
         + dprin.name COLLATE Latin1_General_CI_AS AS RevokeMe
FROM sys.database_permissions AS dperm
INNER JOIN sys.database_principals AS dprin
  ON dperm.grantee_principal_id = dprin.principal_id
WHERE dprin.name = 'public';

Yes, we’re only using our database now!

So all is well with the world…

Until the day comes when you actually want to revoke permissions to that user. So you run the above code, copy the RevokeMe column and paste it into the management window. and you get…

GO is a special little guy. It’s not exactly T-SQL. It’s a way of telling the SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) to send everything before it, from the beginning of the script or the preceding GO, to the SQL Server instance.

If you read the documents, the main point to take away is…

A Transact-SQL statement cannot occupy the same line as a GO command. However, the line can contain comments.

GO is a special little snowflake and needs to be on his own line then. Simple enough if you know that SQL Server converts CHAR(10) into a New Line.

If you didn’t know that, well you know that now….P.S. CHAR(13) is a carriage return 😉

So let’s update our script with some CHAR(10) and see what happens then.

SQL & BBQ, both work well with CHAR

SELECT dprin.name AS DatabasePrincipalName,
       OBJECT_NAME(dperm.major_id) AS ObjectName,
       dperm.permission_name AS PermissionName,
       N'USE '
         + DB_NAME()
         + CHAR(10)
         + 'GO'
         + CHAR(10)
         + N'REVOKE '
         + dperm.permission_name
         + N' ON OBJECT::'
         + OBJECT_NAME(dperm.major_id)
         + N' FROM '
         + dprin.name COLLATE Latin1_General_CI_AS AS RevokeMe
FROM sys.database_permissions AS dperm
INNER JOIN sys.database_principals AS dprin
  ON dperm.grantee_principal_id = dprin.principal_id
WHERE dprin.name = 'public';

WithDBAndChar10 — That smokey, wood-fire CHAR

Now, when we paste the RevokeMe column to a new window, we get…

StillNoNewLine — Oh look, it’s a wild, rare nothing…I love them!

…absolutely no difference. 🙂

Why am I smiling?

Here, around 500 words in, we get to the meat of our post. How do we keep new lines when copying in SQL Server?

Tools | Options | Query Results | Results to Grid | Retain CR/LF on copy or save

Two things need to be done here.

This checkbox needs to be enabled.
CHECK!
A new window needs to be opened and used.

New window open, we run our script again, and this time, when we copy and paste the results, we get…

FinallyWorks — Winner, Winner, BBQ Chicken Dinner

Dessert:

So if you are using T-SQL to create scripts, and you’re having this problem with GO or just new lines in general, make sure that the “retain CR/LF on copy and save” checkbox is ticked.

Now, improve that script more, throw it in a stored procedure, and you never know, it may be semi-useful. 🙂

T-SQL Tuesday #89 – The times they are a-changing: Inline Out-Sourcing.

It’s T-SQL Tuesday time! T-SQL Tuesday time! T-SQL Tuesday, T-SQL Tuesday, T-SQL Tuesday and a baseball bat!
Ahem…sorry about that…

Koen Verbeeck ( blog | twitter ) is hosting this month’s T-SQL Tuesday experience, and wow does he really ask us to search deep within ourselves and ponder our future…

Technology has changed a lot in the past years, especially with cloud/globalization/automation. What an impact has this had on your job? Do you feel endangered? Or do you have more exciting features/toys to work with? Do you embrace the change and learn new skills? Or do you hide in your cubicle and fear the robot uprising?

Now my knowledge of these subjects are somewhat limited; I have yet to research the cloud beyond a rudimentary “poking it with a stick” so I leave that topic to people like Arun Sirpal ( blog | twitter ) and others.

Globalization is another new topic for me. I consider it to be along the lines of being able to fill in positions with people all around the globe (but I’m probably wrong with this). There is a veritable plethora of people online that are excelling at this, so I leave it up to you to seek them out.

Automation…well I have some dealings of this, so I was considering this to be my topic. Then I realised that I could write about something along the same lines. Out-sourcing, but not in the conventional sense. More like…

Inline Out-sourcing.

Start-Transcript.

There’s never enough hours in the day for everything I need to do!

How many times have we heard a complaint similar to that? Especially now-a-days when DBAs are tasked to look after more and more servers and instances. I cannot remember the last time I heard of a DBA taking care of servers in the single digits.

The work of the DBA keeps increasing but the amount of time that we have remains the same. How do we combat this? How do we make it so we are not sprinting just to keep up?

The only answer I have to this problem is this.

Don’t try to re-invent the wheel…let someone else do it.

SQL Community.

The SQL community has been hard at work creating awesome content for everyone to use.

A short list of the top of my head include:

This doesn’t include the tools available from companies like

And have you seen some of the scripts created by individual members of the SQL community?

Similar Tables? No problem for Jana Sattainathan ( blog | twitter )!
Check FreeSpace, Mike Fal ( blog | twitter ) has you covered!
Heck, even the MS SQL Tiger Team ( blog | twitter ) has tools out for you now!

Hmm, maybe this won’t be as short a list as I thought…

Brent Ozar Unlimited ( blog | twitter ) has got the First Responders kit,
Glenn Berry ( blog | twitter ) has his DMV Queries (with video), and
Paul Randal ( blog | twitter ) has his Wait Library, in conjunction to his Wait Script!

You know what this blog post needs? More links!

Andy Yun ( blog | twitter ) has got sp_helpExpandView.
Kimberly Tripp ( blog | twitter ) has got sp_helpIndex, and
Adam Machanic ( blog | twitter ) has got sp_WhoIsActive!

Can I stop now? NO!!! MOAR LINKS!!!

Kenneth Fisher ( blog | twitter ) has got SrvPermissions & DBPermissions.
Raul Gonzalez ( blog | twitter ) has got sqlg_securityAuditServerLogins, and
Ola Hallengren ( blog | twitter ) has got, what the community calls, the “Ola Hallengren scripts“!

And with Microsoft’s advancements with SQL Server and PowerShell, porting it to work with Linux and with Azure, it is like Microsoft are actively trying to get you to automate; actively trying to make your life easier!

Stop-Transcript.

So yes, technology has changed but we, as a SQL community, have worked so that you can use these tools, automate away the drudgery, and embrace these changes.

As long as you embrace this “inline out-sourcing” that we have.

Now I could wax lyrical about all the different aspects of the community and how, with these resources, you shouldn’t need to re-invent the wheel but I’m not going to.

These people have poured hours of effort into these scripts all for you to use. They have poured their heart, souls, and RAM into these scripts just so that they can help out the community.

I would ask a favour of people reading this post though. For all the time, effort, and sacrifice that these people have put in…

Thank them.

It means more than you know.

P.S. Andy Mallon ( blog | twitter ) has a beard…he may win this blog post…