How can PowerShell improve your help desk? Richard chats with David das Neves about his work improving the efficiency of a help desk by writing PowerShell scripts. Not the most obvious role for PowerShell, but David walks through the process of finding common tech support requests that can benefit significantly from automation, rather than mouse click - like uninstalling and reinstalling Java! This leads to a conversation about creating mature, shareable and maintainable PowerShell scripts that multiple people can use reliably and safely. Think bigger with PowerShell!

ITIL and DevOps together? Yes! While at the DevOps Enterprise Summit in London, Richard sat down with Akshay Ananad and Kaimar Karu of AXELOS to talk about how the DevOps practices apply to service management. ITIL was born in a slower time for IT, but the core axioms are still relevant - you just need to focus on service rather than technology. The conversation also goes to including your service management folks in the conversations around software, the same way that operations, infosec and bizdev need to be involved. Devops is all about service, and so is ITIL!

How is DevOps evolving? While at the DevOps Enterprise Summit in London, Richard sat down with Nicole Forsgren to talk about her latest data finding and analysis on DevOps. The conversation starts with a discussion about making good reports, including who the data is collected from. Ideally you'd want a fully random data set, but as Nicole explains, that's not possible - you have to go with as large a set as possible. In the case of the 2017 report, that's 3200 survey responses. And what do they say? DevOps works for everyone! It's not always easy, but it's worth it!

More questions answered at SQLIntersection! Richard hosts a panel discussion of Kim Tripp, Paul Randal, Bob Ward, Brent Ozar and many other SQL speakers from SQLIntersection. The questions are far ranging this time around, talking about business intelligence, data science, reliability approaches and a record-setting answer on data partitioning from You-Know-Who!