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!! We also have some really, really, BIG NEWS for next week! It also happens that next week is Microsoft Build, make sure to register for free! But that news is coming a little later today.
What's that..? I can't drop a teaser at the begining and then not give you a little more? That's fair.
...OK Dear Reader here's a sneak peak.
We have not one, but TWO one hour live shows that will be on Wednesday May 24th & May 25th. We also have TWO big guests.
Brad Schacht (Twitter |@BradleySchacht) from the Azure Synapse Product Group AND Adam Saxton ( Twitter | @AWSaxton) aka one half of @GuyInACube will be there. But that's really all that I can say until a bit later. Other than, this is going to be fun & this is going to be BIG. Enough about the future let's talk about last week.
This past week was Mother's Day, happy belated Mother's Day to all the Mom's out there! My parent's 50th wedding anniversary was this past year. My siblings and I teamed up to buy them a cruise to Europe and they are out having a wonderful time!! Because of this Mom was not here this Mother's Day but there are plenty of Mom's to be recognized in the family, more than just those that we get to see locally. My niece had her first Mother's Day, congratulations Destiny!! To celebrate we did what has become an annual tradition. I make mimosa's, we take the ladies to the spa, and we all get pedicures.
Let's start with the mimosa recipe because it is a good one:
1/3 a champagne flute of Orange Juice
1/2 oz Don Julio Blanco tequila
1/2 oz Gand Marnier Cognac & Orange Liqueur
fill remaining flute with good champagne like Veuve Clicquot
The pedicures started as a simple thing. I took my wife and her Mom, my amazing mother-in-law Judith Gonzalez to get a pedicure and manicure. The next year my Mom & youngest Sister came over and I included them. Instead of just sitting there waiting I decided to join them for the pedicure and the tradition began.
The next is that every year I get the kids to help me cook Mother's Day brunch. The main course was by request. Heart shaped chocolate chip pancakes. I don't do anything simple.
In my house bananas are enjoyed by all. So I made a banana's foster's syrup to go with the pancakes. For this recipe you need banana's, butter, brown sugar, good dark rum (we used my Diplamatico), and maple syrup.
You make banana's foster, flambe, then you add in the maple syrup and stir, finally ladling over finished pancakes. Quick tip, the syrup is hot so if you cut fresh unsalted cream butter and put it on the pancake, then pour the syrup, the butter will be perfectly soft when the plate lands on the table.
Pedicures, pancakes, mimosas, all complete I set about fixing a toilet at the new house and installing a bidet. All in all a very productive weekend. Dear Reader, I hope you and your family had a great and Happy Mother's Day. Ok, on to the recap.
In this video Andres walk through the steps to connect to Azure machine Learning Studio, Importing the required libraries, downloading the data, all the way through training your model.
Then we review how to provision a Serverless Azure SQL Database and why you want to use Serverless. Using demos from Bob Ward's ( Twitter | @bobwardms) demos from his amazing SQL Server 2022 class that is available for free here!! I then show how self-healing Persisted memory grant feedback works in Azure SQL Database by dropping the performance of a query from over 1 minute to less than 2 seconds!
This is in place for Azure SQL Database, Azure SQL Managed Instance, and SQL Server 2022 we just need to have our database compatibility level at 150 or above.
TUESDAY 05-09-2023
On Tuesday it's my FAVORITE half-hour of the week! The Azure Data Community Round Table with Josh Luedeman (Twitter | @JoshLuedeman), Andres Padilla, Neeraj Jhaveri, and myself. We recapped the fun that we had at SQL Saturday Jacksonville.
After a conversation that covered Guardians of the Galaxy 3, The Flash, and Andre's amazing drone demo at SQL Saturday Jax we got to the real star of the show. The content. Here is the content covered on the show in the order of appearance:
