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:
Hello Dear Reader, what a week! On Thursday my wife and I closed on a new house. We are so incredibly excited! We owned a house for a very short period of time. When we bought the house we did not look at the school districts.
When the kiddos came to live with us full time during the pandemic we quickly found out the schools were..... really bad. Great neighborhood, beautiful house, bad schools. So we quickly came to the conclusion that we would have to move.
We found and even better neighborhood, AMAZING schools, but the cost was the house. We hadn't owned long enough to get much equity. As a matter of fact we lost quite a bit of money. We sold during the pandemic before the housing market went crazy. We thought we would save for a year and then buy a new house in this great neighborhood. What's the old phrase? "Man plans, God laughs". Yeah, the housing market went nuts. One year turned to two, two years turned to three, and three looked like it would turn into four. With three months left before our lease expired I did a lot of calculations and found we might be able to get a house. AND WE DID!!!
We had just started to really enjoy doing the small things that make a house yours. The best part is we only one mile away from our old house, so we get to keep the same awesome schools, we stay in the same neighborhood, and I get to keep my same running & walking routes!
Josh Luedeman (Twitter | @JoshLuedeman), Neeraj Jhaveri (Twitter | @Neeraj_Jhaveri), Daniel Taylor (Twitter | @DBABulldog), Andres Padilla (Twitter | @nodestreamio), & myself all decided we should submit to the conference. The really amazing part, as much time as we've spent with online we've never all gathered together before. Josh, Neeraj, & I had met pre-covid during work trips, but Andres & Dan had joined our team during the pandemic. Our good friend Bradley Schacht (Twitter | @BradleySchacht) from the Azure Synapse Product Group joined us!
We started out with a nice dinner on Thursday and the in person preparations began for our pre-con DBA 101: A Full Day of Fundamentals. We had a great group of gentlemen that joined us for the day. We covered a lot of basics about SQL Server and the Cloud, specifically Azure, but we made sure people understood how to translate that skill set.
We did a lot of group exercises, starting with building on premise, hybrid, and cloud architectures. Then applying SLA's, RTO, RPO requirements so we could discuss how to configure backups, high availability, and then disaster recovery.
We reviewed basic security within SQL Server which translates to Azure SQL, as well as some basic Identity topics covering AD & AAD. Great group of people and a great way to kick off Friday.
Friday night took us to the SQL Saturday Speaker dinner and then a group activity we had planned together watching the Guardians of the Galaxy 3. No spoilers. Great movie and a really nice send off to the trilogy.
After that we headed back to the hotel, hung out, had some nice conversations, and then went to sleep so we could start the big event, SQL Saturday.
All of us who have been in the community for a while have seen the ups and downs that happened during the pandemic. We all had a lot to deal with in that time, and there were some devastating losses for me personally. Maybe next year I will write about it, but there are some areas that are still to raw for me. I'm sure there are for a lot of people. I tried to remind myself during that time that in the middle of something you cannot see the end, nor can you see the recovery. I held fast to the idea that they would occur.
In the SQL Community I have made so many close deeply personal friendships, that calling people "friends" hardly does justice to what I feel. Of those people Karla & Rodney Landrum are up there at the top. The last time I saw them they came to Orlando to visit. Karla, Rodney, Sue, and myself went to Chef's in the Paris district of Epcot. We also had them over to the house. I cooked, Karla mixed the drinks (which I loved still to this day!) and we had a fantastic time. That was 2019. There is no way we could have known how long it would be until we saw each other again, what we would have encountered. It was all I could do not to breakdown crying as I hugged Karla.I didn't realize she would be there, and the joy I feel even know days removed is palpable. I'm so glad we are having in person events again. I'm so glad I get to see my friends, donate my time, and teach people. If you have a SQL Saturday happening near you, you've got to check them out, I cannot recommend getting involved enough.
Ok, over to the recap.
MONDAY 5-1-2023
On Monday Josh Luedeman published his first video, way to go JOSH!! Josh's video Setup Windows with Chocolatey for Data Developers walked us through using the Chocolatey packages to install and configure post-Windows installation tasks easily!
He installed Git, WSL 2, Ubuntu, Spotify, Discord, PowerShell, Azure Data Studio, SQL Server Management Studio, and Signal! If you find yourself setting up a new Windows computer, this is a fantastic shortcut to the installation process.
WEDNESDAY 5-3-2023
On Wedneday we released my latest video on creating a Dynamic Pipeline in Azure Synapse & Data Factory!! This is a process that I've walked many customers through over the years. The key is we are trying to minimize the number of Source & Sink data sets created to import data in this video.
Dynamic Pipelines are incredibly powerful and can be used in many different ways. This was just one of them, but based on the reaction from you Dear Reader, we will be showing a few additional ways this can be used!
What an amazing week we had last week, and it's only going to get better! This week we have Andres & Neeraj presenting Computer Vision with Azure ML Studio that will be live today at 1 PM EST.
I will have another video this Wednesday, and of course our Tales from the Field Azure Data Community Round table will be this Tuesday Live at 1 PM.
I'm sure we will figure out some adventure to have this weekend, alright Dear Reader. Time for me to head out, as always Thank You Dear Reader for stopping by.
Hello Dear Reader! My lastest blog on our Azure FastTrack blog for Microsoft is live, Monitoring Deadlocks in Azure SQL Managed Instance.
Here's a little from the blog:
To paraphrase Annie, Deadlocks ARE JUST AWFUL! When they occur, it means one transaction was the victim and rolled back, the other succeeded. You have a couple different ways to monitor them in Azure SQL Managed Instance. Let's review those together.
What is a deadlock? To quote our MS Learn Documentation, "Deadlocks occur when two or more processes or transactions block each other from continuing because each has locked a database resource that the other transaction needs".
In layman's terms a deadlock occurs when two queries are blocking one another and neither could ever complete its transaction. Pretend two people need to use the same door. They cannot fit through at the same time. One must stop and let the other proceeded first. Now add on top of that they both reached for the door knob and grabbed it at the same time, both pulling the door in an opposite direction.
Instead of simply waiting, one must let go of the door knob. In this case the door knob is a table, the hands reaching out are attempting to gain a lock. In SQL Server, all versions of the database engine, this is accomplished by the Lock Manager it uses a process called FIFO, first in first out, to determine who has to let go.
In the case of SQL one transaction is a deadlock victim, it is killed and the transaction is rolled back. So if this is occurring on your system fixing it is very important. First you have to find out if they are occurring, and that's what we will cover in this blog post today!
Hello Dear Reader! I've realized something writting this blog. I don't like to sit still. It is very rare that I have a down weekend, and this weekend was no different. My amazing wife did something really cool for me for Christmas.
You see I'm hard to shop for, or at least that's what I've been told. I don't mean to be, but I am. My birthday is in January. When I was a kid you got presents on your bithrday and on Christmas. Even though they are in different years, mine are so close together that for 10 months of the year there is nadda, then 2 months PRESENTS!
So with that in mind, if I want something I tend to buy it. At this point in my adult life I'm just used to that. So Sue came up with something cool. I love giving people experiences be it with food, giving advice or tips on Orlando, Disney, or Universal Studios or even when peoplke come over playing bartender, setting up events with friends (see last week).
Sue got me experiences, and what a time we've had. That included this Saturday seeing Steve Martin & Martin Short live. I was laughing so hard throughout the event, but it wasn't just comedy. They are story tellers, showmen, and presetors. I couldn't help of people I know like Buck Woody (@Twitter | @BuckWoodyMSFT ), Patrick LeBlanc (Twitter | @PatrickDBA), or so many other amazing people in our community.
The timing and the comfort of doing a show with someone you know well. That made me think of Josh Ludeman (Twitter | @JoshLuedeman). There is no one in this world that I've presented with as much as Josh. As I enjoyed the banter back and forth you could see the comfort that comes from time and practice.
It was a great time and a great day. On Sunday we had that unusual down day. I did some work in the office, getting ready for our soon to be move, and when it came to dinner I wanted out of the house. I snapped a picture while we were out at bartaco. It has be come more and more rare to have all five of us at dinner together. Looking at the picture afterwards I realized something importiant. Serenity is now at the teenage point of making goofy faces in every family photo.
....it'll be a long two years, but I have plenty of her brother's from that period in time. As the youngest this is the last time I'll have to go through this. That acknowledgement came with a bittersweet feeling.
All right enough about the weekend, let's get to the round up!
MONDAY 4-24-2023
On Monday Daniel Taylor (Twitter | @DBABulldog) dropped his first video on the channel. Congratulations Dan! He had a really great point of view, working with a customer he needed to solve the problem of teaching them how to backup SQL Server via URL. The twist is the DBA's do not have rights to get SAS tokens, and so he had to teach the Azure Admins how to do that portion.
On Friday Neeraj Jhaveri, Daniel Taylor, and myself will be teaching our DBA 101: A Full Day of Fundamentals, but Andres Padilla & Josh Luedeman will be presenting at the event as well. The whole Tales from the Field crew is together live for the first time at a conference.
This is going to be a lot of fun. We have 8 sessions on the agenda so come and attend, have a conversation with us, or grab a sticker while we have them!
We hope to see you in Jacksonville, but more than anything Dear Reader thank you for stopping by!
