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.
Thursday 2-16-2023
On Thursday we kicked off our Round Table with our good friend Daniel Taylor (Twitter | @DBABulldog) sitting in for Josh Luedeman. Dan joined Andrés Padilla (Twitter | @Nodestreamio), Neeraj Jhaveri (Twitter | @Neeraj_Jhaveri) to review the AMAZING CONTENT created by you the ccommunity!
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.
On Wednesday we have another great MS Tech Bits that will drop. This time Andés and Neeraj are back for the first of what will be a series of videos teaching you how to use BICEP to deploy Analytics Pattern 1 for Azure Synapse Analytics using our Analytics in a Box GitHub repo!
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! 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:
Hello Dear Reader! We had a big week on Tales From The Field! We've got some great stuff planned for you this week, but before we get to the Live shows tomorrow 10/18 & 10/20, I wanted to do a quick recap of last week.
Ignite is always an exciting time, announcements are in the air, and we have truly arrived at what I like to call Fall Conference season. This is a lot like pumpkin spice season, but technology flavored. ...it still has a lot to do with Starbucks as we are all in line to get coffee.
Ignite returned to an in-person gathering at the Washington State Convention Center for the first time since 2019 when it was in Orlando. I always love when it is in-person. Hopefully, we have more in person with a streaming component next year. It is really impowering to allow the millions at home who cannot attend in person to attend remotely.
All right enough talk, let's get to the shows!
TUESDAY 10/11 SHOW
Last week was Microsoft Ignite and we kicked off our show with TWO big guests. We had Niko Negebauer Sr. PM from the Azure SQL Managed Instance Product Group, (Twitter | @NikoNeugebauer) join us on the show! For years Niko was a Microsoft MVP, contributing to the community as a chapter leader, Presidente of the TUGA in Portugal, a PROLIFIC & amazing blogger. Presenter at many international conferences, and user groups.
We also had Anna Hoffman, (Twitter| @AnalyticAnna) Sr. PM from the Azure SQL Data Platform join us! Anna is a Data Scientist, The Host of Data Exposed, the co-host of Something Old Something New which is a series about the math behind data science & how it applies to Azure ML, presenter at International conferences, one of the most recognizable faces in the world of Azure Data.
I was the host! Neeraj won!! We discussed our favorite Ignite experiences and Niko flipped the scripted and asked us questions. Check it out at the link above.
THURSDAY SHOW
On the Thursday show we had the Community Round table and covered Community & Ignite content all in on location. Here's a summary of what we covered on the show:
We love our Sr. Escalation Engineers at Microsoft. These folks are our hero's and our firefighters. When you have a big issue, you call and put in a ticket. These are the folks that come in when that ticket is escalated. One of the blogs that we featured was by Paloma Garcia Martin and she was so kind to give us another Shout Out on their team blog last week!
It's been a while. I've been busy working with a few colleagues on our show Tales from the Field. This has been a learning experience.
I've had to brush off some old skills on graphic design, bone up on some new skills namely how to run a YouTube channel & Video Editing!
This week we had two amazing shows. First up was our Tuesday show where the Hosting Duties are on the line!
Let me quickly back up, the Tuesday show is a bit of a game. We have a Host. The Host pick's the topic. The Host then awards points or deducts points based on how we do.
Sometimes we also have a guest. Our guest this week was Bradley Schacht Principal Program Manager from the Azure Synapse Analytics Product Group.
"But Balls", you say. "What's a Product Group?"
GREAT QUESTION Dear Reader!! At Microsoft teams that produce products are in our Engineering Organization, and they produce a product for example SQL Server, Azure Synapse, Azure Data Factory. Each of those teams are called Product Groups. So when I say, "Someone is a member of <insert product here> Product Group", that means they work on the team that builds or shapes the future of that product.
These are the people you want to know. Bradley joined the Tuesday show and as the guest he also gets to award points. Whoever has the most points, wins the hosting duties, and will be the host for the next show and they will pick the topic.
So on Tuesday Hosting Duties were on the line and I WON!! Here's a link to the show below.
This is exciting because next week is Microsoft Ignite, don't forget to sign up it's free!! So I get to host next week, pick the topic. Plus we have TWO special guests. Anna Hoffman, host of Data Exposed, & Niko Neugebauer from the Azure SQL Managed Instance Product Group!
On Thursday we had Hope Foley guest host for my buddy Josh Luedeman. Josh was out with a bad case of Pizza is better than Ninja's..... best explained by this clip from the Tuesday show.
Back to Thursday. We had Hope Foley & special guest Lonnye Bower for the Community Round Table!
Sooo much great community content from the round table. Here's a list of that content!
The world of data is changing. It used to be enough to collect data and report off of it. ‘Business’ people would make ‘business’ decisions based off of reports, historical experience, and their gut. ‘Business’ people may go into meetings and say things like, “We will change our business and stop doing A. We used to do A, and we got profit! Now we do A, and profit is down. Therefore we stop doing A, and now we will do B!” They may have data to back up their decision, they may not have data. Sometimes they got it wrong, sometime they got it right. One day someone figured out that they could use math and science to calculate the odds of making a good decision. In Las Vegas they call it gambling, in the business world we call it Data Science. Data Science is not some mysterious solution that fixes everything. It is the process of using a series of calculations to make many micro-informed-decision. This leads to informed decision making. Those calculations are what we would call models, and they store the algorithm that we will use to calculate our odds. There are many different ways to create, store, and utilize models. In this pre-con we will discuss some of the architectures and ways this can be accomplished. We will then focus on the newest advanced analytics capabilities in SQL Server and in R to discuss on premise architectures. Including the advantages to storing data and models in SQL Server as well as how to use Predictive and Prescriptive analytics. We will then end the day shifting our focus to the cloud with an end to end Lab focusing on Azure ML, Spark, Hadoop, Power BI, and Modern Applications.
*Note to participate in the Lab you will need access to Microsoft Azure and an Azure account.
What does the agenda look like?
8:30 AM – Speaker & Course Introductions
8:45 AM – Data Science concepts
9:45 AM – Begin Introduction to R – Using Baseball Analytics
10:00 AM – Break
10:10 AM – Continue Introduction To R
11:00 AM – R and SQL Server 2016/2017
12:00 PM – Lunch
1:00 PM – Azure ML Overview
2:00 PM – Begin Hands on Lab Walk Through
4:30 PM – End of Class
Hello Dear Reader! This past Thursday night I took my son Zachary to see Spider-Man Homecoming, it was an amazing movie with a fantastic cast. Both of us are BIG comic book guys, and we enjoyed it immensely. As a matter of fact we both enjoyed it so much that I couldn’t help but wonder how the rest of the world felt! You’ve probably seen different ways to view Twitter sentiment analysis, but I wanted to do this today using Azure Logic Apps to create a real-time Power BI Dashboard, with a live data source using Azure SQL Database. We’ll how we did this in detail in a later blog post, but first let’s look at the data!
