Tuesday, March 28, 2023

Tales From The Field Weekly Wrap Up for the Week of 03-20-2023 & Kiddos Growing Up

William, right, 11 years ago the morning of our college tour
 Hello Dear Reader! When I got off the plane from SQLBits I wasn't feeling great.  To be honest, I was a little concerned.  I'm a diabetic asthmatic.  Some people are generally unconcerned when they get a cold, some even feel that way about Covid.  Not I.  

For years when I get a cold they would linger, antibiotics would need to be perscribed, consumed, and then about a month later my voice would return to normal.  I've been very fortunate that my immue system seems to have recieved a kick start in the last few years.  No longer is the need for antibiotics absolute.  

 No longer is a cold a one month sentence of exercise purgatory.  Really, I feel lucky.  Despite feeling awful on Monday & Tuesday, by Friday morning I felt great and sounded like Barry White.  So with me feeling better, my wife very happy with my deep sexy voice, we packed up the car and drove my youngest son William to a campus tour of the University of North Florida

It was a really beautiful campus and the tour was fantastic.  William is going to be very happy up there.  I'm familar with UNF thanks to SQL Saturday Jacksonville.  It has been held on their campus since my first trip to the event all the way back in 2011 and SQL Saturday #74.

Seeing the campus from the eyes of a perspective student was amazing.  I'm used to the excitement of Friday morning pre-con's and the buzz in the air as you follow the SQL Saturday signs to the parking garage.

This time it was following the signs to the Campus Tour, taking in the campus, food venues, gym, and different  class rooms.  What an exciting time he is about to embark on!  As if it wasn't enough, father time gave me a solid kick to the feels.  The picture posted above of William and his younger sister finger painting was my Facebook memory.  My phone alerted me that I had a memory, and I clicked on it.  All I could think of was how time flies.  There's no way, when I snapped that picture 11 years ago, that I imagined him getting ready for college.

Alright Dear Reader, let's get to the re-cap.


MS TECH BITS - WEDNESDAY 3-22-2023

My deep voice was in full effect as we took a jump into the Transaction Log.  The Transaction Log is an essential part of SQL Server.  That's an understatement.  That's like saying your lungs are essential.  The Transaction Log is fundemental.  We look at what it stores, how it holds data, how Virtual Log Files work, and a little bit about recovery models.

If you are interested in replicating the demos, I'm keeping them over in my GitHub Repo for SQL Scripts.  The demo envrionment I used for this was a docker container running SQL Server 2022, if you want to know how to set up that environment check out this video.


COMMUNITY ROUND TABLE - TUESDAY 3-21-2023

The Community Round Table featured my sultry deep voice as well as Josh Luedeman (Twitter | @JoshLuedeman), Neeraj Jhaveri (Twitter | @Neeraj_Jhaveri), and Daniel Taylor (Twitter | @DBABulldog).


We did a quick recap of SQLBits talking about the wonderful event, and then we covered the content.  No more delays, let's get to it.  Content in order of appearence on the show:


Neeraj 

Performance Tuning Synapse Dedicated Pools - Understanding the Query Lifecycle by Sarath Sasidharan Twitter @sarathsasidharan2016 


Bradley 

Call to Action for Female Speakers to Submit to EightKB  by Tracy Boggiano Twitter  @TracyBoggiano 


Dan 

SQL: Setting local date and time for a session in Azure SQL Database  by Dr. Greg Low  Twitter @greglow 


Josh 

How To Convert Parquet Files into GeoJson Files and Save it in Data Lake using Synapse Notebooks by Sally Dabbah 


Neeraj 

Creating a custom disaster recovery plan for your Synapse workspace Part 1   by Freddie Santos Twitter @fredguis 


Bradley 

Building, Deploying, Sharing a Remote Jupyter Book in Azure Data Studio by  Steve Hughes  Twitter @DataOnWheels 


Dan 

How I evaluate personal safety at tech conferences  by Eugene Meidinger Twitter @SQLGene 

 

Josh 

Azure Data Factory Global Parameters and Azure Bicep Templates  by Tao Yang Twitter @MrTaoYang 


Neeraj 

My week at SQLBits 2023: Why You Should send your Employees to Conferences by Kay Sauter Twitter @KaySauter 


Bradley 

Connecting Power BI to Azure SQL Database using Private Endpoints  by Andy Cutler Twitter  @MrAndyCutler 


Dan 

Why read committed is the default isolation level, and what to do next  by Kendra Little Twitter @Kendra_Little 


Josh 

Azure Data Factory CI/CD with GitHub Actions  by Olga Molocenco   

 

WRAP IT UP

We did some experiements earlier this month and loved the reception we recieved.  We are working hard over here at Tales From The Field, TFTF, HQ to come up with some additional content for next month.

This week we have our Community Round Table on Tuesday & our MS Tech Bits on Wednesday.  We hope you will join us for them, and if there's anything you would like to see sound off in the comments!  We always love to hear from you Dear Reader.

And as always, Thank You for stopping by!

Thanks,


Brad


Monday, March 20, 2023

Tales From The Field Weekly Wrap Up for the Week of 03-13-2023 & SQLBits 2023

 Hello Dear Reader!  What an incredible week we had.  I started off traveling on Monday of last week.  At the airport I ran into my friend David Pless ( Twitter | @dpless), he and I were on the same flight to London!  It was great to start off the trip hanging out with a good friend. 

After landing Tuesday morning, I took the Tube to Padington Station, then the Great Western Railroad out of London heading to Newport Wales.

There is a Rail Strike occuring in the country right now.  That added a bit of tension to travel days as we did not know if trains would be running or not.  One day your train would not have any issues, the next you would recieve alerts that your service may be disrupted.  Luckily I did not experiance any issues with trains, but the drama hung in the air all week long for everyone.

SQLBits was taking place at the Newport Wales ICC.  It was a fantastic venue, for more on that take a look at the shorts which started with a walk up and grew to be a review of the days events at SQLBits. 

I was hustling to get out there because I was assisting with an amazing pre-con being put on my by Azure FastTrack Product Group, PG, colleague Stijn Wynatts (Twitter | @SQLStijn), Filip Popovic & Mark Pryce-Maher  from the Microsoft Azure Synapse PG, & Mr. Simon Whiteley (Twitter | @MrSiWhiteley) Microsoft MVP for Lakehouse in a Day!  I was one of the people walking around and assiting others. I did that straight up until our Tuesday show.  

Wednesday I assisted with Bob Ward (Twitter | @BobWardMS), Marissa Matthews, and Buck Woody's training day, The SQL Server 2022 Workshop.  It was a PACKED room.  We had over 120 people sign up and we needed multiple additional tables.  We did a lot of hands on work, I know if you where there chances are I helped you do it at some point!  It was another fantastic day of learning.  After that we went to a Girlguiding, Welsh Girl Scouts, volunteering event with other Microsoft Employees and Microsoft MVP's.  We helpd to pick up litter and keep some of their fields and facilities clean.  This was just good for our souls.  It was wonderful to meet people from Newport and work along side them.  This was hands down my favorite event that we did this week.  Which is high praise, because this week was amazing.

I will get more into the work done in the updates below, but it was a wonderful and exhausting day that would end with myself in the Auditorium presenting with none other than Patrick LeBlanc (Twitter | @PatrickDBA).  Saturday Patrick & myself presented on The Most Powerful Azure Service that You've Never Heard of.

Intruged?

Let's head over to the recap.

MS TECH BITS - MONDAY 3-13-2023 & WEDNESDAY 3-15-2023

On Monday my colleague Marco Aurelio Cardoso from the Azure FastTrack PG joined me to discuss OpenAI and Prompt engineering.  We put this video together to showcase a partical application of how these services would be utilized.  We also had some fun asking about the physical hygine of Master's of the Univers Characters as well.

Marco showed me how to create an Azure AI Chatbot that utilizes an OpenAI model to create an interactive Chatbot in a Slack Channel.  We had a really good discussion about Responsible AI and the need to understand the source for the information that our model is returning. 

Wednesday I had a video on how to set up a SQL Server 2022 Instance in Seconds, also it is free using the free version of Docker and SQL Server 2022 Developer Edition on a Docker Container.

There are some internal concpets regarding SQL Server that it is importiant to understand.  Understanding how to stand up an evironment quickly to test out new features is a good skill to have and will be key for some of our futuer conversations.


SQLBits 2023 SHORTS 

All this week I was making shorts videos recaping some of the activities of the conference.  I'm only one human and could not make it to everything, but if you couldn't make it to SQLBits or if you want some nestolgia from the event please take a look.

Newport Wales ICC walk up to #SQLBits 2023 Training Day 2


SQLBits Behind the scenes Day 1 Keynote, Sessions, & Volunteer Event

EPIC SQLBits Costume Party, 5K Run, & General Sessions Day 2!!


Last Day at SQLBits 2023, Community Keynote, General Sessions, & Saying goodbye

As you can see this was an exceptional event.  So many fantastic sessions, I cannot wait to go look at the SQLBits channel to find the sessions I missed and watch them when they are posted!  Keep in mind SQLBits makes these sessions available for you to consume so make sure to check them out.

COMMUNITY ROUND TABLE - TUESDAY 3-14-2023

Buck Wood (Twitter | @BuckWoodyMSFT) joined Josh Luedeman (Twitter | @JoshLuedeman), Neeraj Jhaveri (Twitter | @Neeraj_Jhaveri), Andres Padillia (Twitter | @nodestreamio), and myself.  Buck and I were live from the SQLBits Conference.  


No further delays, lets get to the content in the order of appearence:

Neeraj

Roll with us at SQLBits 2023! - Microsoft Community Hub by Marisa Mathews Twitter @MarisaMathews @AzureSQL

Bradley

Creating an Azure SQL Private Link Endpoint and managing DNS By John Lunn  Twitter @jonnychipz

Andres

Parameters and Hyperparameters in Machine Learning and Deep Learning by Kizito Nyuytiymbiy  Twitter @KizitoNyu

Josh

Scale Multiple Azure SQL databases on a logical server  by Laith Ayesh

Neeraj

Azure Synapse analytics (dedicated SQL pool) data modelling best practices  by Bhaskar Sharma Twitter @sharmabhaskar

Bradley

Pro SQL Server 2022 Wait Statistics Book  by  Thomas LaRock  Twitter @SQLRockStar

Andres

How to Write Better Prompts for Chat GPT  by Derek Slater Twitter @GripRoom


Josh

Code Reuse with Spark Functions for Azure Databricks  by John Miner Twitter @JohnMiner3

Neeraj

Appreciation Posts for Engineers Day Across Globe  by Muskaan Sabarwal Twitter @MuskaanSabarwal

Bradley

SQL Server Wait Statistics (or please tell me where it hurts…)  By Paul Randal Twitter @PaulRandal

Andres

ChatGPT-3 Prompt Engineering  by Matt Nigh Twitter @literallynigh

Josh

Monitoring PgBouncer in Azure PostgreSQL Flexible Server  by Varun Dhawan Twitter  @iVarund


WRAP IT UP 

As I type this I'm crossing the Atlantic Ocean to head back home.  I don't know that there is anything left for me to say.

Tuesday we have the Community Round Table & Wednesday we will be dropping our MS Tech Bits.  I'm ready to lean this seat back and get some rest.

Have a great week Dear Reader, be good to one another.  And as always, Thank you for stopping by.


Thanks,


Brad




Monday, March 13, 2023

Tales From The Field Weekly Wrap Up for the Week of 03-06-2023 & Pineapple on Peperoni

 Hello Dear Reader!  Last week was an incredible week.  We dropped new content on Monday, Tuesday had the Community Round Table, Wednesday MS Tech Bits, and released YouTube Shorts all week long.

We also waded into controversy on Twitter.  It began with a seemingly innocent and funny post by Buck Woody (Twitter | @BuckWoodyMSFT) and well.... it just took off from there.

Needless to say, anyone who doesn't like Pineapple and Peperoni on their NY Style pizza clearly has never tried it and is therefore wrong.  End of discussion.

A quick note.  

*Hawiian pizza is disgusting.  Canadian Bacon is a lie.  Real Canadian Bacon should be maple coated real-bacon.  Not ham.  Ham should not be on a pizza, with the only exception being a supreme pizza.

End note.

My Mom & Dad were over for my youngest daughter's 13th birthday.  Happy Birthday Serenity!  During which my father, who ran a pizza restaurant, and spent over 25 years in the restaurant business. had never tried it.  He did, and he was surprised how good it was.  He even went for a second slice!


On to the recap!


MONDAY 3-6-2023

Andres Padilla (Twitter | @NodeStreamIO) & Neeraj Jhaveri (Twitter | @Neeraj_Jhaveri) kicked off Monday with an introduction to Azure OpenAI.  


This video has proven very popular, I'm not going to ruin it for you.  Head over and take a look.  Andres walks us through registering to gain access to & then shows us some of the Azure OpenAI playground.  


TUESDAY 3-7-2023

Tuesday is the new home to our Community Round Table.  It was a great show, but as always the star of the show is the content from the Azure Data Community.


List of content in order of appearance on the show:

Neeraj

AWS Lambda Function to import CloudTrail Logs to Azure Sentinel by Sreedhar Ande Twitter @sreedharande

Bradley

SQLBits Agenda and PowerShell, displaying and searching   By Rob Sewell  Twitter @SQLDBAWithBeard

Andres

IoT Production Training Pack by Raul Alarcon  

Josh

Farming from space: How orbital data is unlocking novel agriculture insights by Matt Jennings  Twitter @MattJenningsMS

Neeraj

Power BI Paginated Reports - Subscriptions by Olivier Van Steenlandt Twitter @Oli_Vsteenlandt

Bradley

Advancing Spark - Power BI Databricks Connector with Native SQL  by  Simon Whiteley  Twitter @MrSiWhiteley

Andres

Automatic IoT Edge Certificate Management with GlobalSign EST   by John Lian 

Josh

Using calculation groups or one to many relationships for time intelligence selection   by Alberto Ferrari Twitter @FerrariAlberto

Neeraj

Azure Synapse Spark Notebook – Unit Testing   by Arun Sethia 

Bradley

Provide data lake access with Azure Synapse Analytics  by Patrick LeBlanc, Adam Saxton, Guy In A Cube Twitter @PatrickDBA, @AdamSaxton, @GuyInACube

Andres

Best Computer Vision projects With Source Code And Dataset by Naem Azam  Twitter @naemazamankon

Josh

Announcing the retirement of Streaming Dataflows  by Jadelyn Ray Twitter @MSPowerBI



WEDNESDAY 3-8-2023

On Wednesday we released The SECRET Language of Azure SQL!!! WAIT STATS! That's right Dear Reader 3 exclamation marks. This is serious.  It's also not really a secret. Everyone wants you to know about this.  


In the comments I have links to a great script that Paul Randal (Twitter | @PaulRandal) wrote over a decade ago, to a book on the subject that Thomas LaRock (Twitter | @SQLRockstar) has written.  Check out the video then read Paul's article and order Tom's book.  This is a very critical topic for any SQL DBA or Developer to understand.


SHORTS

We release a whole host of Shorts related to the subject of interviewing for a job as a SQL DBA or for a SQL Developer.  There quality gets better as the week goes along.  I switched video editing tools and was able to improve the quality. 


Here's a list:

 We will see how this goes, bit of an experiment on our part.  We had around 1000 cumulative views on this last week alone.  It's a difficult format because you have a max of 60 seconds to get a fairly technical point across.  If there is something you'd like to see we'd love to hear from you!

WRAP IT UP

Alright Dear Reader.  I've off to SQLBits this week.  Stay tuned to the channel.  We have a SPECIAL Monday content drop, our Tuesday Community Round table, Wednesday MS Tech Bits, Interview clips from previous interviews will be dropping, also maybe some shorts from SQLBits


As always Dear Reader, Thank you for stopping by.


Thanks,


Brad

Tuesday, March 7, 2023

Tales From The Field Weekly Wrap Up for the Week of 02-27-2023 & Some Changes

 Hello Dear Reader!  Change is the one constant in life and over here at Tales from the Field we've been
hard at work making some changes. 

Over the last 5 months since we kicked off the show we've been experimenting with different content.  We started off with the hosting & interview show on Tuesday and the Community Round Table on Thursday.

We added a few sporadic technical videos, and then in February kicked off our MS Tech Bits every Wednesday.

We are data folk at heart, so after looking at the analytics, we were blown away!  In just one month of technical videos we had almost doubled our subscribers, and our viewership.

While we produced 2 Live Shows per week, we received just as many views and almost doubled our subscribers with one technical video a week.

Out of the Live Shows the most popular thing we do is the Community Round Table, and it is our favorite thing!  We get to talk about you and what you are doing.  We get to shine a light on new voices, wonderful established voices, or voices that you may not be aware.  Each of my cohosts brings an amazing and unique point of view to this endeavor.   I love learning new things or getting new videos to check out thanks to Neeraj Jhaveri (Twitter | @Neeraj_Jhaveri),  Andrés Padilla (Twitter | @nodestreamio), Daniel Taylor (Twitter | @DBABulldog), & Josh Luedeman (Twitter | @JoshLuedeman). 

 I guess that is another change as well.  We appreciate the efforts of Daniel Taylor so much that he is now officially part of the team!  Dan is our go-to when we've had someone out of the office and he has an amazing technical mind.  We are lucky to have him as part of our crew.

We want to devote more time to producing technical videos. So this week we are moving our Community Round Table shows to Tuesday and we are pausing the interviews.

We will continue our focus on technical content and making sure that we are rolling out a few technical videos a week.

All based on the work we are doing with customers aka friends over "in the field", answering questions, or covering topics we've had to help our friends with.  A big important part of our job is also our internal work in Azure Engineering, also technically our field.  Hence our name, Tales from the Field.

This week and next week we will be adding a treat of Monday videos and some shorts relating to interviewing for SQL DBA jobs. 

In some fun news we've had the logo refreshed, some laptop stickers made prior to SQLBits & SQL Saturday Jacksonville #1041!  If you are attending those events and want a sticker please find me and I'm taking about 200 so find me I will be happy to share them!

After SQLBits we will be working on a new channel trailer, getting the logo incorporated into our header, and adding it to our video trailers.  We really love it and the graphic designer did a bang-up job!

Ok, enough from me.  On to the Recap!


TUESDAY 2-28-2023

We had the AMAZING Vicky Harp (Twitter | @VickyHarp) on the Tuesday show for an interview.  The subject was Building a Brand.  Vicky is a Principal Group Program Manager for the Windows Developer Experience Team, Vicky has also had a hand in building some of the product, that if you use SQL Sever, you know & love.


This was a fantastic episode were we discussed the concepts of external or community branding as well as internal or building your brand inside of the company you work for.  Both of these brands are ESENTIAL to success.

We covered advice and guidance that Vicky had for people new in their careers and also for those that had been around for a while.  Make sure you check it out!


WEDNESDAY 3-31-2023

On Wednesday we launched our latest MS Tech Bits Make Azure SQL Managed Instance General Purpose FASTER!!I  On a personal note, THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR THE RESPONSE!  As of right now this is the MOST watched video on our channel and it has not yet been out a week.

If you liked this video, we have some really great content planned at the channel.  We hope you will check it out if you haven't already.



THURSDAY 3-2-2023

On Thursday we had our Community Round Table featuring data from you the Azure Data Community or the community at large. 


This is always a fun show where I get to hang out with my friends and share the things we've all found interesting over the past week.  The star of that show is the content, so without further ado.


Content in order of appearance:

Neeraj

The Importance of Personal Branding to Career Growth Plus 12 Tips for Branding Success by Jessica H Hernandez Twitter @GreatResume


Bradley

DataChick's Secure Your Azure SQL Data Challenge By Karen Lopez Twitter @DataChick


Andres

How To Fix Stream Lag: 5 Reasons You are Lagging by Live Streaming Tech Twitter @tech_streaming


Josh

Announcing Azure Data Tech Groups v2.0  by Rie Merrit Twitter @IrishSQL & @AzureSQL


Neeraj

Using OpenAI GPT in Synapse Analytics by Thomas Costers 


Bradley

Programming Databases with T-SQL for Beginners by Buck Woody & Marisa Mathews Twitter @BuckWoodyMSFT, @AzureSQL


Andres

Calling REST endpoints from T-SQL by Rob Farley Twitter @rob_farley, @IrishSQL, @AzureSQL


Josh

Understanding Change Data Capture for Azure SQL Database Part 1 by Greg Low Twitter @greglow


Neeraj

Personal Branding for Students: 7 Tips You Should Know by Nate Torres


Bradley

Extracting Data from the AFAS REST API with Azure Data Factory By Koen Verbeeck Twitter @Ko_Ver


Andres

How I Built A Streaming Analytics App With SQL and Delta Live Tables by Richard Tomlinson Twitter @tomlinsonr


Josh

SQL Server 2022: Measuring Extended Events Performance Impacts by Jonathan Kehayias Twitter @SQLPoolBoy



WRAP IT UP

This week is a big week Dear Reader. We have technical content dropping this Monday and next Monday.  This Monday we have an Introduction to OpenAI by Andrés & Neeraj!  We have our Tuesday Round Table show featuring maybe your content!?!  

We have our Wednesday MS Tech Bits, this will be yours truly with an Introduction to SQL Wait Stats and we are dropping our SQL Interview shorts all this week.

Most important, Thank You Dear Reader for stopping by.


Thanks,


Brad