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.
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:
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
Hello Dear Reader! We had a beautiful weekend here in Florida. Spring is in the air, mainly because the temperature is ranging between 85 to 90 degrees Fahrenheit. This has lead to some rather pronounced sneezing on my morning exercise routine. The type of sneezing that has scared children and small animals.
It was a really nice weekend, enjoying the tale end of February before a busy March.
This was a good time to get some recordings done, have some outings with the Mrs., and meet the gentleman for a morning of golf. I'm not good at golf, quite terrible actually. It is a good excuse to spend two hours with friends talking about life, family, and generally trading our perspectives on things.
As we say goodbye to Winter and begin to focus on Spring it seemed like last week was indeed the perfect way to send off February with a bang.
Off to the wrap up.
Tuesday 2-21-2023
On Tuesday we had a little bit of Christmas in February with out Elfster show. Our good friend Lonnye Bower (Twitter | @ilovesql) had the brilliant idea to have a gift exchange! Andrew Nathan (Twitter | @AndrewNathan05) & Daniel Taylor (Twitter | @DBABulldog) were quick to sound off their excitement and we planned our eventual holiday extravaganza!
We all were super excited for this. No technical topics in this show, just a bunch of friends joking around, playing Secret Santa, and opening presents. If you are looking for some fun and a laugh, please tune in. This was a really fun time!
This is a great video and it is just the start, personally I'm really looking forward to additions to this series.
Thursday 2-23-2023
On Thursday we had our Community Round Table featuring amazing content by you the Azure Data Community & sometimes great authors from our community at large!
Josh Luedeman (Twitter | @JoshLuedeman) wore his hat from the Tuesday show, and we kicked off reviewing the content our team had seleted for the week. But you don't want to here me talk about it, here are the links!
We've got a big week planned this week. Vicky Harp (Twitter | @vickyharp ) Principal Product Group PM Manager will be on the Tuesday show!
On Wednesday I have some MS Tech Bits that will be posted, on Thursday we have the Community Round table featuring data from the Azure Data Community, and it maybe featuring your content! Let us know if you are writing a blog, producing a video, or doing something noteworthy in the community!
Hello Dear Reader! It's the Presidents Day holiday today in America. With it comes a 3 day weekend. To celebrate Josh Luedeman (Twitter | @JoshLuedeman), myself, and our families went to see Antman & the Wasp: Quantumania over the holiday weekend.
Despite the poor reviews on Rotten Tomatoes the movie was great. Once again proving why I'm not a movie critic, and why I don't understand how movie critics have a job. Have no fear, there are no spoilers here. It was an exciting action-adventure with a really good family theme, and a surprisingly happy ending with a heavy bit of foreshadowing. I enjoyed it so much I saw it the next day with my oldest son and it was just as enjoyable as it was the first time.
We headed over to visit family for dinner on Saturday, while Sunday was a nice lazy today I am using my day off to learn a little more about video editing, pre-posting our next two MS Tech Bits , and learning about end screen YouTube pages. My wife does not have the day off so I'm on dinner duty tonight!
"So Balls," you say "what's for dinner?".
Excellent question as always Dear Reader! I have some ribeye steaks defrosting in the refrigerator. I plan to make a homemade chimichurri, put half on the steaks, and vacuum seal them, then sous vide them, before finishing them off on the grill to get a nice char on the exterior. But enough of us all getting hungry before lunch, let alone dinner, lets head off to the recap!
Tuesday 2-14-2023
Valentines Day kicked off with the Batman of Guy in a Cube (Twitter | @GuyInACube), Mr. Patrick LeBlanc (Twitter | @PatrickDBA) himself! We had a great conversation about how to Manage Work Life Balance. Part of that conversation has to involve admitting that we have not always done a good job of managing work life balance.
Often it is times of trial and error, life, and loss that teach us that we have to do better. On Thursday, our good friend Lonnye Bower (Twitter | @ilovesql) challenged us to call it a Life-Work balance, but I'm getting ahead of myself.
Wednesday 2-15-2023
First off thank you Dear Reader for the reception of our MS Tech Bits! This is quickly becoming some of our most viewed content. This past week was no exception. In less than a week this has become our 2nd most viewed MS Tech Bits!
I'm working with some friend on the Azure SQL MI PG and we have videos that we will be cross posting helping people to further understand one of my favorite products Azure SQL Managed Instance. In this video we show how to backup and restore a SQL MI DB from a SQL MI Instance and restore it on a SQL Server 2022 instance.
We do this in an unencrypted manner, but it is completely possible to do this in an encrypted manner. We will cover that in a future video.
As I mentioned earlier Lonnye challenged us to stop referring to Work-Life balance and instead say Life-Work balance. Bravo to Lonnye for pushing us to be better!
Here is the content in the order of appearance on the show:
This week is the week Dear Reader! Christmas in February, our Elfster show is happening. Who got who? What gifts did we each get? We will finally find out Tuesday 2/21/2023 at 1 pm EST. This will be a packed show, and it looks to be a lot of fun.
Thursday we will be back with the Community Round table, potentially featuring your content!
Ok, time to rest up while I can.
Oh, one other thing. We broke a milestone and it is all thanks to you Dear Reader. We offically hit over 100 subscribers on our YouTube channel! Thank you so much for joining us on this ride.
And as always Dear Reader, Thank you for stopping by.
Hello Dear Reader! It's been a while since I had time to sit down and write out a Monday re-cap
This past week was my birthday week. With all the stress of the current modern world it was really nice to have some dedicated family time.
The fun started on my actual birthday, my wife gave me an amazing birthday present for me and my oldest son to go to the Mega-Con comic book convention this year!
My parents drove over and took me plus my youngest son to lunch at Yellow Dog Eats, an AMAZING BBQ joint nearby.
That evening the family went out to eat, we played games, checkers, and topped it off at home with a Double Fudge Coca-Cola cake. Not on the list of approved items for diabetics, but the goal is to have a little fun. This was genuinely one of my best birthday.
This weekend we went to Disney Springs with a group of 10 friends. We headed over to Splitsville Lanes and to go bowling.
The music was surprisingly good, food was solid, and the drinks were flowing. Which is good, because none of us will becoming professional bowlers anytime soon.
We walked around, enjoyed some live music, and because it was Disney, the shopping. Enough about that, let's move on to the recap!
Tuesday 1-24-2023
We Had Paloma Garcia (Twitter | @PalomaGarcia40) Sr. Support Engineer from the Azure SQL PaaS Solutions team on the show! The theme of the show was IT Troubleshooting Skills!
We had a lot of fun, some insightful, and some surprising conversations. In a very lucky turn of events, I won the hosting duties and will be the host for the Tuesday show on 1/31/2023!
Thursday 1-27-2023
On Thursday we had the Community Round Table!
Our good friend Dan Taylor joined the show in place of Josh Luedeman who was out for the day. The guys surprised me by singing "Happy Birthday", very sweet of them to do so, and we covered amazing community content!
Here's a list of all the content covered in order of appearence:
Quick Programing Note: We have to move the Elfster show. Coordinating schedules with so many wonderful people can be tricky. But everyone who is on our list is exceedingly important to one another and we have to make sure everyone is there! So we are moving the Elfster show to Tuesday February 21st. So a little Christmas in February!
Alright Dear Reader, I'm heading out for some quick morning exercise before the day begins in earnest. We appreciate you and hope you have a wonderful day!
Hello Dear Reader! Last week was a week we have been building towards since the launch of Tales from the Field. My favorite conference every single year, Live! 360. Live! 360 is 5 conferences in one. TechMentor, Visual Studio Live, Artificial Intelligence Live, Cloud & Containers Live, & SQL Server Live.
Much like the SQL community became the Microsoft Azure Data Community SQL Server Live is largely about the Data Community as a whole with sessions on Synapse, COSMOS, Azure Arc Data Services, SQL Server 2022, Power BI, and many other topics.
My favorite part about this conference is the organizers and the people who attend. Of course, a big bonus is I get to see friends of my and other Microsoft colleagues, and that is always incredible. But these organizers are something else. Everyone I get to come here immediately understands how great they are to work with, what an amazing job they do taking care of the attendees, the speakers, & the staff involved. I've been presenting at Live! 360 since 2012 at the first SQL Live event. The organizers have been the same this whole time. They are great people, that you just love to work with.
The audience at Live! 360 is also different than what I find at most community events. This is a much more developer & enterprise customer centric conference, and it forces you to look outside of the traditional DBA events. I started my technical life as a developer, and it is a chance to stretch my old technical skills.
This year I had some fun and created several videos where I was walking up each day. I will post those soon, and we have a big surprise for you this week when we will drop a whole lot of Live! 360 content on Thanksgiving Day!
"So Balls", you say, "When do we get to the wrap up?"
I hear you Dear Reader. Away we go!
SUNDAY 11-13-2022
This was a great event. My colleagues Josh Luedeman (@JoshLuedeman | Twitter), Buck Woody (@BuckWoodyMSFT | Twitter), & myself started the week by delivering our Hands on SQL Server Ground to Cloud workshop on Sunday!
If you didn't make it and would like to take the course, I have good news for you. The whole SQL Server Ground to Cloud course is posted on GitHub and you can access it here!
TUESDAY 11-15-2022
"WHOA, WHOA, WHOA BALLS!", you say. "What happened to Monday?".
I was busy working with customers and setting up the Microsoft Booth for the conference on Monday Dear Reader. There were great pre-con's underway by Davide Mauri (@mauridb | Twitter), Thomas LaRock (@SQLRockstar | Twitter), Karen Lopez (@DataChick | Twitter), and many more. We had a meet and great with speakers and attendees, dinner, then bed, because we had to be up early for the keynote!
Tuesday kicked off with a Keynote by Henk Boelman (@hboelman| Twitter) and Buck Woody AI for Good - Using the Intelligent Data Platform to Create Assistive AI.
During the keynote Buck started off by showing how he assisted the owner of a grocery store with the Microsoft Intelligent Data Platform. We used Azure Synapse Link for Azure SQL Database to create a seamless workflow migrating OLTP data to our data warehouse. Buck then used Power BI in an Azure Synapse Analytics Workspace to generate reports going against the real time data.
That's great Henk replied. Buck helped the seller. Henk wanted to empower the shopper. He gave an example of someone with sight impairment. He show how to train a voice assistant, which was amazing and a little scary. He could then use that voice assistant, using his voice, to say anything he typed.
He then DELETED HIS DEMO TO SHOW US HOW TO REBUILD IT!! Talk about high stakes. I don't think Buck will complain about me typing in a demo again..... actually he will. He has. He has complained about me typing in a demo.
Henk then used ML Flow to train a synaptic model that could verify and describe items using a camera. He then created a work flow using both models so he could scan an item and use his voice assistant to read the contents. In this case a can of Sprite. It not only read the can, it read out the calories and ingredients!
But that's not all. Tuesday also had our LIVE SHOW! Yes, we were live from Live! 360 with special guest's Thomas Larock & Buck Woody!
I Hosted!!! Want to see who won? ....watch the video!
WEDNESDAY 11-16-2022
Wednesday started off with in a really nice way. There's this really great guy on the other side of the Pond named Hugo Kornelis (@Hugo_Kornelis| Twitter). Hugo is battling a really tough disease. He has blogged about it prolifically. He's a good man. He's a good friend. We all want him to get better. Some months ago another of his very good friends reached out to many of us, and we all spread the word behind the scenes and we all got t-shirts that said #TeamHugo. At our conference and the PASS Summit out in Seattle, many people wore a shirt and took pictures sending our love to Hugo on Wednesday.
My friend Ginger Grant (@DestertIsleSQL | Twitter) and I had our picture taken by Buck supporting our friend. Like I said really nice way to start off the day.
The majority of Wednesday was spent working in the Microsoft Booth and interviewing some people for this Thursday's show! Davide, Karen, and Alan Hirt (@SQLHA | Twitter) all amazing people in the own right, sat down with me for interviews. Lunch was the Bird's of a Feather luncheon where we sit with attendees and talk about anything they want to discuss. I had a full table and we had a lot of great discussions. Some performance tuning, some Azure related, some analytics, some Azure Security and Azure Policy based questions.
At the end of the day we had a quick dinner out, before heading back to the dessert luau.
At this luau Tom had insisted one of his co-workers go up and participate in the show. She repaid him by ensuring he would have to go up later. When his name was called, I could see him shrinking away. He clearly wanted to pull his hat down, and step further in the shadows so he would not have to go on stage. It was apparent. He really wanted this to pass over.
So I did what any good.... no scratch that, any truly great friend would do.
I held my hand up high and yelled at the top of my lungs, "HE'S RIGHT HERE! THOMAS LAROCK IS RIGHT HERE! IT'S OK I FOUND HIM."
Naturally, when he took the stage the next name called could not be found. The man on stage said he needed someone. Thomas leaned over and gave him a name. "BRADLEY BALL", the man bellowed.
I looked at Josh shrugged and said, "Yep. Seems fair.", and walked up to the stage. After that it was time to head back to the hotel room because I had to present at 8 am. Oh, if you want to see what happened, watch the video.
THURSDAY 11-17-2022
First session of the day was me presenting Indexing Internals for Developers & DBA's. The audience was amazing. We had almost 100 people in the room. Great crowd, great feedback, really wonderful follow up questions and conversations with attendees. My thanks to them, without attendees showing up in the room speakers cannot do what we do. Over half of my audience was developers, and I love it when we discuss concepts.
SQL Server is an application. It is written by developers. It is used by DBA's. We live it we breath it, but we should never forget it is an application. Developers & DBA's must work hand in hand to exchange knowledge in order to be successful in any enterprise. The best places I've ever worked have great interpersonal relationships that span IT teams. They have to. We all depend on one another.
Next up was the SQL Server Live! Panel Discussion: Azure Cloud Migration Discussion. Buck, Karen, Alan (filling in for Ginger), and myself were on the panel and Thomas was our host. This was a great Q & A with the audience were they asked us questions and we gave them answers. There were lot's of great questions from "how do I convince my boss to move to Azure", "does the fact that we are using M365 help us in a migration", to "what are the gotcha's", "what mistakes have you seen made", "what are the best strategies" were asked. Two people working for Microsoft PG's and two Microsoft Data Platform MVP's with over 25 years of being MVP's did our best to give out the answers.
Once again, amazing attendees!
Next up I presented Azure Synapse Serverless Pools: POLARIS DEEP DIVE. I love this session. This is a fun one where we discuss the architectural differences between Dedicated Pools and Serverless Pools. I show a bunch of demos, the last is a customized SQL Stress test against two external tables hitting the same object to show the concurrency scale of the Polaris engine on Serverless Pools.
Then we talk about some architecture patterns. I love giving this talk to user groups or conferences. Serverless Pools are one of my favorite new products to use in Azure Synapse. I wish I got a picture of the room and the great audience. Alas I did not, I was busy talking, answering questions, and having a good time with the crowd and I forgot to take a picture.
The final session of the day was the NEXT? LIVE! 360 Networking Event. Another event were we the speakers were 1:1 with the audience. Any attendee who wanted to come and ask us questions could. Questions we received! We had questions on data modeling, secure data centers, replication, SQL Server 2022 and why we should upgrade from SQL 2019, tips on migrating from SQL 2012 to 2022 including a discussion on how to use the Query Data Store, and more.
Here's a quick video summarizing the day!
All of that and we also had the Tales from the Field Community Round Table!! We recorded this last week because Josh and I were both delivering sessions during our normal broadcast time. Great discussion up front about Thanksgiving & Time travel.
Of course, OUTSTANDING content provided to the community from:
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. 
