Tales From The Field Weekly Wrap Up for the Week of 04-03-2023 & Easter

Hello Dear Reader!  Hopefully you had a great weekend.  This weekend was filled with gatherings.  On Saturday we gathered with friends and had a really nice Game Night.... where no games were played and it was just perfect.  

It had been so long since we all gathered that we ate taco's, made some movie plans, watched hockey, and just generally enjoyed one another's company.  The food theme was tacos, my compliments to the many chef's.  Mere descriptions alone will not do it justice but there was homemade taco meat, refried beans, melted cheese, homemade rice & black beans, fresh guacamole, and some of the best chocolate chip cookies ever.

The following day was Easter.  My parents joined Sue, the kiddos, and myself.  Even though the kids are 19, 18, & 13 years old respectively.  Yet, they are never too old for an Easter basket!  When I was over in Wales & London for SQLBits I love to get candy for Easter.  There are so many amazing options to choose from and the fact that it is just slightly different, but oh so delicious, adds an element of wonder and amazement.

Some of my favorite Dad things to do are when we prepare for Christmas or Easter.  I also love some of the little things.  When the kids were small I loved making lunches. Making sure to add cinnamon apple sauce, snack cakes, some type of gummi snacks, making sure they each had their own individualized sandwiches. Serenity's favorite was a peanut butter and sliced bananawith no crust, I prefer the crust on mine.  All of those small things, that they are too big for now.

Lots of wonderful happy memories Dear Reader, the most important thing is to be present in the moment and love the people around you.  Alright, enough reminiscing.  Grab a Reese's Peanut Butter Cup shaped like an Easter Egg because it's time to bounce over to the re-cap!

WEDNESDAY 04-05-2023

On Wednesday we released our latests MS Tech Bits diving into the structures of Heaps and Clustered Indexes.  Why do we have the VS. on the slide?  The default table type in Oracle is a Heap, the default table type in SQL Server is a Clustered Index.  For years therese were the two most dominiant relational database systems and having different default recommendations creates confusions.

 

It's importiant to remember what we've learned from Ted Lasso.  "All people are different people", "Be a goldfish", also that tip about the peanut butter was pretty good and I would recommend the White Chocolatey Wonderful. I digress, all databases are different databases.  Some may be based off of ACID some are not, but indexing structures in SQL Server, PostgreSQL, MySQL, or Oracle are all things you need to understand.

It affect performance and every day functionality.  So we dive into the conceptual structures in this video, demos are coming this week!

TUESDAY 04-04-2023

On Tuesday we had our Azure Data Community Round Table!  The wonderful Daniel Taylor (Twitter | @DBABullDog) was in for Neeraj Jhaveri (Twitter | @Neeraj_Jhaveri), Josh Luedeman (Twitter | @JoshLuedeman), Andres Padillia (Twitter | @nodestreamio), and myself had a great day talking about the AMAZING content created by the Azure Data Community.

No time to waste, here is that wonderful content in the order it was covered on the show:

Dan

• DBA in training: SQL Server high availability options  by Pamela Mooney Twitter @PamelaMooney

Bradley

• T-SQL Tuesday #160: Round-Up  by Damien Jones Twitter  @amazonwebshark

Andres

• Edge AI: From Model Development to Deployment   by Raj Prasanna Ponnuraj

Josh

• Faster training and inference using the Azure Container for PyTorch in Azure ML  by Bea Stollnitz Twitter @beastollnitz

Dan

• [How-To] SSRS migration by Garry Bargsley Twitter @gbargsley

Bradley

• The Kingdom of AdventureWorks Calls for Aid - Asad Khan, Bob Ward, Sanjay Mishra & Buck Woody by  SQLBits,  Asad Khan, Bob Ward, Sanjay Mishra & Buck Woody Twitter @SQLBits, @Bob_Ward, @BuckWoodyMSFT, @AzureSQL 

Andres

• Create AI tracking Drone using DJI Tello  by Murtadha Bazli Tukimat  Twitter @RobotAndCode

Josh

• Single Server to Flexible Server Migration tool is GA in Azure Database for PostgreSQL  by Shriram Muthukrishnan  Twitter @azureDBpostgres

Dan

• How To Learn Microsoft Azure in 2022 by Thomas Maurer Twitter @ThomasMaurer

Bradley

• Power BI datasets CI/CD (the easy-ish way) by Stephanie Bruno Twitter @StephTBruno

Andres

• Amazing Invention-This Drone will change everything by Mark Rober  Twitter @MarkRober

Josh

• GitHub Codespaces for Students and Educators  by Nehemiah Emmanuel  Twitter @devgenix

WRAP IT UP.... AND SQL SATURDAY JACKSONVILLE!!!

This week we have the Community Round Table on Tuesday at 1 pm EST.  Join us to see the Azure Data Community blogs & videos we will be featuring.

On Wednesday we will have our MS Tech Bits, this will be the Demos that accompanied last weeks conceptual ideas about indexes!

SQL Saturday Jacksonville is just under 1 month away!! All of the Tales from the Field crew will be at the event.  Make sure to come to Daniel, Neeraj, & my pre-con A Full Day of DBA Fundamentals.  The full event schedule is LIVE!!

This will be a fun week, we hope you have a great one!  And as always Dear Reader, Thank you for stopping by.

Thanks,

Brad

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

Tales From The Field Weekly Wrap Up for the Week of 02-06-2023

 Hello Dear Reader!  We had a great last week on Tales from the Field.  This weekend was also a really nice one.  On Saturday a group of friends gathered to share some friendship, conversation, and remember a dear friend that is no longer with us at one of my favorite places in Orlando, Lee & Rick's Oyster Bar.  

Lee & Rick's has been around since 1950 and it doesn't look like much has changed in that time.  That's just the way I like it.  My friends Juan, Dan Taylor (Twitter | @DBABulldog), Brad Schacht (Twitter | @BradleySchacht), and myself had a great time.

That wasn't the only thing going on this past weekend as it was also Super Bowl day.  That's sports ball  for the non-sports followers.  The one day of the year that even non-sports ball fans will at least watch the game to see some of the best commercials we will get all year.  Not to mention the halftime show is always amazing.  It did not disappoint!  The game was incredible, two amazing teams playing their hearts out.  Or as I would translate to my friend Buck Woody (Twitter | @BuckWoodyMSFT), one sports ball team sports balled better than the other sports ball team.  Which is fairly normal. 

On to the show!

Tuesday 2-7-2023

On Tuesday we had iAsia Brown (Twitter | @TechPicasso) Producer at X-Box Game Studios Publishing on the show!  Neeraj had won and was the host this week.  Our topic was Diversity and Inclusion.  iAsia is a brilliant, wonderful, amazing human being.  She is a Veteran of the US Airforce & the Marine Corps. and we THANK her for her service!  Our discussions were wide ranging, poignant, and incredibly valuable.

I understand that this topic could be a trigger to many people because of current events.  If that is the case please take the time to watch this show.  When we make things better for everyone we open them up to have an amazing experience.  Inclusivity opens new markets and individuals to capitalistic opportunities that they may not otherwise have access to.

If you feel I'm wrong, its not hard to find me and I am open to your feedback.

Wednesday 2-8-2023

On Wednesday we dropped our second February video for our MS Tech Bits!  Neeraj Jhaveri (Twitter | @nodestreamio) and Andres Padilla (Twitter | @neeraj_jhaveri) share with us the Tips & Tricks for Azure Data Lake Gen 1 to Gen 2 Migrations.

This topic is a big deal!  Andres worked with the PG to develop the program and work with some of our largest customers in the world to migrate off of ADLS Gen 1 to ADLS Gen 2.  He and Neeraj share their experience and many links that will help you through this journey.  Speaking of which, if this is a situations where you find yourself or your company finds itself, then you should DEFINITELY be working with our team Azure FastTrack CXP.  We are a complimentary Product Group in Azure Engineering that works directly with customers on their move or adoption to Azure.  Here's a link to a video on how you can engage with us!

Thursday 2-9-2023

On Thursday we had our Community Round Table featuring incredible content from you the community.

I could write more about what we did on the show but I'd rather share all the amazing content that we covered in the order of appearance:

Neeraj

• What is Diversity & Inclusion? - Global Diversity Practice by Global Diversity Practice Twitter @gdptweets

Bradley

• Microsoft’s commitment to the data community By Jeremy Kadlec Twitter @MSSQLTips  

Andres

• The elephant in the room: How to write PySpark Unit Tests by Prashanth Xavier

Josh

• Structured Streaming in Synapse Spark by Ryan J Adams Twitter @ryanjadams

Neeraj

• Bing With AI: Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella on Why Search Is Changed Forever by Joanna Stern Twitter @JoannaStern

Bradley

• Resolving Azure Data Studio's Identity Crises by Frank Boucher & Erin Stellato Twitter @fboucheros @erinstellato

Andres

• Combining the power of Optimum, OpenVINO™, ONNX Runtime, and Azure by The AI Show Live (Cassie Breviu, Akhila Vidiyala, Devang Aggarwal)

Josh

• SQL Server on Linux Install - The Basics by Phil Ekins Twitter @SQLPhilUK

Neeraj

• Black History Month: Why we celebrate it in February : NPR by Scott Neuman Twitter @ScottNeumanNPR

Bradley

• Sessions and Speakers by Numbers (SQLBits 2023!)  By Rob Sewell Twitter @sqldbawithbeard 

Andres

• Creating Azure Monitor alerts for Cosmos (and other databases) queries by Andre Dewes 

Josh

• SQL Server Transactional Replication by Gareth Newman 

WRAP IT UP

We hope you will all join us this week, on Tuesday we have a BIG guest.  No spoilers on who won and will be the host, but the one and only Patrick LeBlanc (Twitter | @PatrickDBA) from Guy in a Cube on the program on Tuesday at 1 pm EST.  

I've known Patrick for well over a decade at this point in my life.  He's an incredibly man and I cannot wait for the conversation!

Don't forget we will have another MS Tech Bit this Wednesday and as always the Community Round table will be live on Thursday.

We hope to see you there.  And as always Dear Reader, Thank you for stopping by.

Thanks,

Brad