Just a little under 18 and one half years ago, William came into my life. There are a lot of words to describe a new baby, but the one surround Will's birth is hard to quantify. Don't get me wrong. Joy, happiness, elation, wonder, awe, all-encompassing-love, all of those words were there.
Holding Will's hand on day 3
Eventually.
Will's birth was the most intense 24 hours, and then week, of my life.
William was my third child, so having one was not new to me, but this experience was. Whereas his brother and sister had cried loudly, been weighed, and handed over in warming blankets to be cuddled with; William was rushed away. He was born into this world with a collapsed lung.
While I've spoken about this, I've never written about it before. There is a lot flooding back to me just looking at the picture on the screen. He was born just before Christmas and I've always been thankful to the nurses, the doctors, and other stall at the Sentra Hampton Roads Hospital until we moved we used to bring them cookies every Christmas Eve, remembering those wonderful people there over night with us.
The Graduate & Family
Let me skip forward in time. William's lung miraculously reinflated. After 5 days the oxygen hood came off, we were able to hold him, and feed him. He came home a bright beautiful bouncing baby boy, and grew so very fast. We have had lots of adventures.
My Bug, my nickname for Will, loves roller coasters and amusement parks. I think he is the only person in the family that loves theme parks as much as I do. For the last 15 years he has been my roller coaster riding buddy.
Last Thursday he graduated from High School. Roller coaster riding buddy indeed. That first hill was a big one. He is off to college this Fall, but it feels like only yesterday I was holding that little hand. One of my favorite quotes comes from the Little Buddhist Handbook, "The trouble IS you BELIEVE you have time". Yes. That is the trouble.
Next up, we will head to college orentationnext month. Before then we will move, because we bought a house. We've all been doing a lot of work on it getting it ready to move in. William is leading the way on the painting front, having painted his room and helping is younger sister with hers. The move is officially underway, not just because of the hours of work, or mounds of things we've already moved. No, the way I know this is I am sore in places I forgot I could get sore.
THE BIG WEEK
We talked about it last week Dear Reader, but a very big week is upon us. Microsoft Build starts today. On Wednesday 5/24 & Thursday 5/25 there will be a massive Digital Event that will be simulcast across the Guy in a Cube, Power BI, and Azure Synapse YouTube channels starting at 9 am PST.
One hour before we will be live on the Tales from the Field YouTube channel. Adam Saxton (Twitter | @awsaxton) of Guy in a Cube (Twitter | @GuyinaCube), Kal Yella & Bradley Schacht (Twitter | @BradleySchacht) from the Azure Synapse PG, and of course Josh Luedeman (Twitter | @JoshLuedeman), Neeraj Jhaveri (Twitter | @Neeraj_Jhaveri), Daniel Taylor (Twitter | @DBABulldog), Andres Padilla (@Nodestreamio), and myself will be live.
On Monday my friend Daniel Taylor released an AMAZING video. He walked through the process of taking Ola Hallengren's SQL Server Mainteance Solutions and using them with Azure SQL Database using Azure Data Factory.
I don't feel like enough people are aware of the service and what it can do. If there is an item on the list you want to see a longer video on, let me know we always love the feedback!
TUESDAY 5-16-2023
On Tuesday we had our Azure Data Community Round Table featuring content from the creators in the Community for the Community! We had a great conversation opening the show about Mother's Day weekend and the activities surrounding it for each of us, plus a Happy belated Mother's Day to all the MOM's out there!!!
As always the star of the show is the content, so here is the content by the WONDERFUL creators by order of appearence on the show:
Ok Dear Reader remember today is the kick off of MS Build. If you haven't registered go do it, it takes a few minutes and it get's you free access to the big show.
Now before we get to the BIG EVENT, we need a pre-show! The pre-show will be happening as a lead in each day on Tales from the Field one hour before the Digital Event kicks off. The Digital Event will take place as a simulcast on the YouTube channels of Power BI, Azure Synapse Analytics, & Guy in a Cube.
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:
Hello Dear Reader! This past week is a blur. It was a tough week at work. That sentence is an understatement, but its really all I can say at this point. Monday sent me for a tail spin. I was fresh off a weekend relaxing with my wife, planning events with my friends, and thinking things were pretty well set. Life has a way of suprising you.
We powered through last week, had our Community Round Table, and dropped our new content. Internally at Tales from the Field we did some Camtasia training, explored some new technology, and started some planning for the next 3 months. I'm excited about those things. Before I knew it the weekend was upon us.
12 Years Later MegaCon 2023
I'm really tough to shop for, I hear that a lot around Christmas time. I don't mean to be difficult, but if I want something I tend to buy it. Books, collectibles, comics, whiskey, gin, ....I digress. This year my wife did something exceptionally cool for me. She bought me things to give me experiences, one of those was ticket's to MegaCON in Orlando. She bought me floor passes & and extra pass to share.
I shared mine with my oldest son Zachary. My first MegaCon ever was with Zachary when he was 7 years old. When it comes to comic book conventions I've only ever been to two and he was with me at both of them. He enjoyed this so much, I think this is a must do again next year!
One of the things I've always loved it the effort people put into their costumes, how generous they are with their time, and a willingness to celebrate with others. That was as true when he was a little kiddo dressed in a Superman t-shirt as it was this year when he was dressed as Eren Yeager this year.
I hope you had a good weekend out there Dear Reader! On to the wrap up.
WEDNESDAY 03-29-2023
On Wednesday we dropped our MS Tech Bits, Turn SQL to KQL IN SECONDS with Azure Data Explorer. This video is based off the demo I did with Patrick LeBlanc (Twitter | @PatrickDBA) in our Session at SQLBits (Twitter | @SQLBits).
I love Azure Data Explorer, it is an incredibly powerful service for digesting log data and querying massive data sets and returning results in seconds. It has so many capabilities and possibilities. BUT... I don't know KQL and I don't know if I want to learn another language. Fear not as I show in this video you can use the EXPLAIN statement to translate SQL to KQL that you can then run against your data sets.
I'm hoping this leads to peopel realizing that the bar for entry to this service is low, if you know SQL then you know KQL!
TUESDAY 03-28-2023
On Tuesday I once again teamed up with Josh Luedeman (Twitter | @JoshLuedeman), Andres Padilla (Twitter | @nodestreamio), & Neeraj Jhaveri (Twitter | @neeraj_jhaveri) to review the AMAZING community content that you all produced! If you missed that make sure to check it out.
The true star of the show is the content produced by the Community. Here is the content in order that it was covered on the show:
This week we have our Community Round Table on Tuesday where we will once again feature content from you the Azure Data Community! We will be live at 1 pm EST, but you can always catch us after the broadcast on our YouTube Channel.
Wednesday we will have a video discussing the internals of Heaps, Clustererd Indexes, & Non-Clustered Indexes!
Time to say goodbye until next week. Hope you have a great week and as always Dear Reader, Thank you for stopping by.
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! 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.
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.
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.
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.
