Monday, February 6, 2023

Tales From The Field Weekly Wrap Up for the Week of 01-31-2023

 Hello Dear Reader!  After a weekend with a lot of activities, it was a down week here at Casa Balls.  Woke up and walked a lot.  I'm still not back to running.  A groin pull is not something I've had a lot of experience with, yet it entered my life in December and I cannot wait for it to leave.

I miss running, last year I ran 755.1 kilometers.  Right now I can walk, as long as my pace is not too quick, and I can ride a bike.  The key is really to get out in the morning, take in some sunshine, and get the blood flowing.  

If I can do that I find that helps put me in the proper headspace to be productive during the day.  One of my favorite things as of late it take pictures.

In the morning I set out and take pictures as I walk around the neighborhood.  Even when I did "run", it was actually interval running.  The reason I note that is I tend to take pictures when I'm in the walking portion of my interval run.  With the exception of my phone, I do not carry a camera on me.  I still  manage to get some really great pictures of the day.  

So this weekend was a lot of walking, cooking, and hanging out.  I hope you had a great weekend, and made it out to enjoy some time outside or inside amongst family and friend. On to the re-cap!


Tuesday 1-31-2023

On Tuesday we had Andrew Nathan (Twitter | @AndrewNathan05) Principal Engineering Manager from the Azure FastTrack Core team was our special guest.  We discussed the Zero Trust Security imitative by Microsoft that all customers should consider when building their architecture.  We also discussed International Travel Tips ahead of SQLBits!  SQLBits is the largest Microsoft focused Data Community conference in Europe.  This year it is Hybrid which means Dear Reader, if you cannot make it in person you could still attend this fantastic conference.




We played our hosting show, I was the host this week!  Want to know who won?  Check out the video above to enjoy the show and find out!


Wednesday 2-1-2023

NEW THIS YEAR! We will be dropping weekly technical content every Wednesday, our MS Tech Bits.  This week it was my turn to produce a video.  I was working with a friend and they wanted to know how to troubleshoot deadlocks they were experiencing.  The first step in that process is understanding what is a deadlock and how to find them when they occur.  So I made this video How to Monitor Deadlocks in Azure SQL Managed Instance to help.


This is a fun little video where I walk you through the process.  Also there is a bit of an easter egg in this vide.  If the shirt I'm wearing on the video looks familiar that's because I wore this in another blog post, and it means a lot to me.

Thursday 2-2-2023

On Thursday we had our Community Round Table.  This is one of my favorite shows every week because we get to give a shout out to the great content producers in the community.  People writing blogs, producing videos, or even GitHub repositories that help people get things done.  It's just amazing.


Here's a list of the content featured on the Round Table in order of appearance:

Neeraj

International Travel Tips: 26 Things to Know Before Going Overseas by Clark Howard Twitter @ClarkHoward

Bradley

Network, Develop & Share @ SQLBits 2023 | Data Exposed Exclusive   By Rie Irish & Simon Sabin Twitter @IrishSQL & @simon_sabin & @SQLBits

Andres

How to integrate Azure Databricks with Azure Machine Learning for running Big Data Machine Learning jobs?   by Pieter Sterkens

Josh

Introducing 'Managed AirFlow' in Azure Data Factory  by Avishek Narain Twitter @narainabishek

Neeraj

12 Tips to Prepare for an International Trip by BenĂ©t J. Wilson Twitter @benetwilson

Bradley

Tempdb Performance Improvements in SQL Server 2022 are Dramatic by Monica Rathbun Twitter @SQLEspresso

Andres

Unleashing the power of AI with Azure OpenAI: A simple guide to get started.  by Meer Alam Twitter @alamMeer

Josh

Beginner's Guide to Azure Data Factory by Catherine Wilhelmsen Twitter @cathrinew

Neeraj

International Travel to and from the United States   | CDC by The CDC Twitter @CDCgov

Bradley

Ready to be a Kusto Detective with Azure Data Explorer? By Patrick Leblanc & Guy In A Cube Twitter @PatrickDBA & @GuyInACube

Andres

MLflow 2.0 and Azure Machine Learning by Facundo Santiago Twitter @santiagofacundo

Josh

When to have Multiple Data Lakes   by James Serra Twitter @jamesserra


WRAP IT UP

And now we draw the blog to a close.  We have a great line up this week!  Make sure to tune in Tuesday at 1 pm EST for a very special guest.  Wednesday we have our second MS Tech Bit coming up with my co-hosts Andres Padilla and Neeraj Jhaveri covering Tips and Tricks for Migrating Azure Data Lake Gen 1 to Gen 2.

On Thursday we will wrap up our week with our Community Round Table also at 1 pm EST.  I hope you all have a wonderful week, and as always Dear Reader.  Thank you for stopping by.


Thanks,


Brad


 

Tuesday, January 31, 2023

Tales From The Field Weekly Wrap Up for the Week of 01-23-2023

 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:

Brad 

All of Paloma Garcia’s Blogs -   (dropdown and select written by) by Paloma Garcia 


Neeraj

  6 Best Practices for Effective IT Troubleshooting by Robert Reselman (Twitter |@Rapid7)


Bradley

Azure Analysis Services Migration to Power BI Premium By Andy Cutler (Twitter | @MrAndyCutler)


Andres

  Application Insights telemetry in Azure Functions  by Orestis Meikopoulous (Twitter|@ormikopo)

Dan

Troubleshooting SQL Server Connection Errors  by Mike Wolfe (Twitter | @NoLongerSet)


Neeraj

Defining Customer Support in 2023: 7 Keys of Modern Support  by Declan Ivory (Twitter | @Intercom)


Bradley

Azure Synapse Analyzer Report to monitor and improve Azure Synapse SQL Dedicated Pool performance by Sanjay Raut


Andres

  Ingesting Time Series Data  by Luis Delgado


Dan

  TSQL Scripts for Troubleshooting Common Issues with SQL Server  by Esther Xin


Neeraj

  6 Ways to Enhance Your Problem Solving Skills Effectively   by Zoe B (Twitter|@Slifestrategies)


Bradley

  SQL Managed Instance: Transactional Replication By Sasa Popovic (Twitter |@SasaPopovicMSFT)


Andres

  ML Inference on Edge devices with ONNX Runtime using Azure DevOps+MLOps   by Wolfgang Pauli (Twitter | @neurobabel)


Dan

  The Art of Troubleshooting for Customer Support Professionals  by Sarah Chambers (Twitter | @sarahleeyoga)


WRAP IT UP

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!

As always, Thank You for stopping by!

Thanks,


Brad

Monday, November 21, 2022

Tales From The Field Weekly Wrap Up for the Week of 11-14-2022 Live! 360

 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:

Neeraj

So you want to talk at conferences? This is what its like.  by Todd Motto Twitter @toddmotto

Bradley

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

Andres

Azure Purview Deployment Checklist by Zeinab Mokhtarian 

Josh

PowerBI Row Level Security by Thomas LeBlanc Twitter @TheSmilingDBA

Neeraj

Introducing the SQL Server 2022 blog series - Microsoft SQL Server Blog by Bob Ward Twitter @bobwardms

Bradley

Synapse Spark Delta Time Travel by Liliam Leme Twitter @LemeLiliam

Andres

Azure Stream Analytics releases slew of improvements at Ignite 2022: Output to Delta Lake and more!  by Ajeta Singhal Twitter @ajeta_singhal

Josh

Four Different ways to Incorporate Azure Synapse and PowerBI  by Ginger Grant Twitter @DesertIsleSQL

Neeraj

Best Thanksgiving Deals by TheBlackFriday.com Twitter @theblackfriday

Bradley

Performance Tuning Table Visuals With Filters Applied In Power BI by Chris Webb Twitter @cwebb_bi

Andres

Optimize your Stream Analytics job’s performance using Job Diagram Simulator by Alex Lin

Josh

DAX Date Calculations Cheat Sheet by Arthur Graus Twitter @ArthurGraus


WRAP IT UP

This was an amazing week.  A busy week.  A week to see old friends, make new ones, and help people learn. 

Remember this week there are no Live Tales from the Field shows, HOWEVER we WILL DROP NEW CONTENT on Tuesday & Thursday just for you!

As always Dear Reader, I hope you have a happy holiday weekend if you celebrate, as always Thank You for stopping by.


Thanks,


Brad