Tales From The Field Weekly Wrap Up for the Week of 03-06-2023 & Pineapple on Peperoni

 Hello Dear Reader!  Last week was an incredible week.  We dropped new content on Monday, Tuesday had the Community Round Table, Wednesday MS Tech Bits, and released YouTube Shorts all week long.

We also waded into controversy on Twitter.  It began with a seemingly innocent and funny post by Buck Woody (Twitter | @BuckWoodyMSFT) and well.... it just took off from there.

Needless to say, anyone who doesn't like Pineapple and Peperoni on their NY Style pizza clearly has never tried it and is therefore wrong.  End of discussion.

A quick note.  

*Hawiian pizza is disgusting.  Canadian Bacon is a lie.  Real Canadian Bacon should be maple coated real-bacon.  Not ham.  Ham should not be on a pizza, with the only exception being a supreme pizza.

End note.

My Mom & Dad were over for my youngest daughter's 13th birthday.  Happy Birthday Serenity!  During which my father, who ran a pizza restaurant, and spent over 25 years in the restaurant business. had never tried it.  He did, and he was surprised how good it was.  He even went for a second slice!

On to the recap!

MONDAY 3-6-2023

Andres Padilla (Twitter | @NodeStreamIO) & Neeraj Jhaveri (Twitter | @Neeraj_Jhaveri) kicked off Monday with an introduction to Azure OpenAI.  

This video has proven very popular, I'm not going to ruin it for you.  Head over and take a look.  Andres walks us through registering to gain access to & then shows us some of the Azure OpenAI playground.  

TUESDAY 3-7-2023

Tuesday is the new home to our Community Round Table.  It was a great show, but as always the star of the show is the content from the Azure Data Community.

List of content in order of appearance on the show:

Neeraj

• AWS Lambda Function to import CloudTrail Logs to Azure Sentinel by Sreedhar Ande Twitter @sreedharande

Bradley

• SQLBits Agenda and PowerShell, displaying and searching   By Rob Sewell  Twitter @SQLDBAWithBeard

Andres

• IoT Production Training Pack by Raul Alarcon  

Josh

• Farming from space: How orbital data is unlocking novel agriculture insights by Matt Jennings  Twitter @MattJenningsMS

Neeraj

• Power BI Paginated Reports - Subscriptions by Olivier Van Steenlandt Twitter @Oli_Vsteenlandt

Bradley

• Advancing Spark - Power BI Databricks Connector with Native SQL  by  Simon Whiteley  Twitter @MrSiWhiteley

Andres

• Automatic IoT Edge Certificate Management with GlobalSign EST   by John Lian 

Josh

• Using calculation groups or one to many relationships for time intelligence selection   by Alberto Ferrari Twitter @FerrariAlberto

Neeraj

• Azure Synapse Spark Notebook – Unit Testing   by Arun Sethia 

Bradley

• Provide data lake access with Azure Synapse Analytics  by Patrick LeBlanc, Adam Saxton, Guy In A Cube Twitter @PatrickDBA, @AdamSaxton, @GuyInACube

Andres

• Best Computer Vision projects With Source Code And Dataset by Naem Azam  Twitter @naemazamankon

Josh

• Announcing the retirement of Streaming Dataflows  by Jadelyn Ray Twitter @MSPowerBI

WEDNESDAY 3-8-2023

On Wednesday we released The SECRET Language of Azure SQL!!! WAIT STATS! That's right Dear Reader 3 exclamation marks. This is serious.  It's also not really a secret. Everyone wants you to know about this.  

In the comments I have links to a great script that Paul Randal (Twitter | @PaulRandal) wrote over a decade ago, to a book on the subject that Thomas LaRock (Twitter | @SQLRockstar) has written.  Check out the video then read Paul's article and order Tom's book.  This is a very critical topic for any SQL DBA or Developer to understand.

SHORTS

We release a whole host of Shorts related to the subject of interviewing for a job as a SQL DBA or for a SQL Developer.  There quality gets better as the week goes along.  I switched video editing tools and was able to improve the quality. 

Here's a list:

• SQL Interview Questions - Understand the Versions of SQL
• SQL Interview Questions - Follow Up After the Interview
• SQL Interview Questions - Understanding Wait Stats
• SQL Interview Questions - Understanding Execution Plans
• SQL Interview Questions - How do you pronounce 'SQL'?
• SQL Interview Questions- the Data Community
• SQL Interview Questions- The Worst Question Ever
• SQL Interview Questions- DON’T RELY ON 3rd Party Tools!
• SQL Interview Questions- Know the basics Clustered Indexes
• Next Week SQLBits 2023!!

 We will see how this goes, bit of an experiment on our part.  We had around 1000 cumulative views on this last week alone.  It's a difficult format because you have a max of 60 seconds to get a fairly technical point across.  If there is something you'd like to see we'd love to hear from you!

WRAP IT UP

Alright Dear Reader.  I've off to SQLBits this week.  Stay tuned to the channel.  We have a SPECIAL Monday content drop, our Tuesday Community Round table, Wednesday MS Tech Bits, Interview clips from previous interviews will be dropping, also maybe some shorts from SQLBits. 

As always Dear Reader, Thank you for stopping by.

Thanks,

Brad

Tales From The Field Weekly Wrap Up for the Week of 10-31-2022

 Hello Dear Reader!  Last week was Halloween and I hope you all had a fantastic time.  Halloween has long been my favorite holiday.  The cost of participation is imagination, activity, or a couple of bags of candy.  Anyone can do it.  It doesn't hurt that my daughter's birthday is on Halloween which makes it extra special!!

This we had the house decorated, table set up outside to give out candy to the neighborhood kids, and my kiddos were old enough that none of them needed me to walk them around to other houses.  This left me, for the first time in at least 19 years, sitting outside giving out candy.

I learned a few things. First, we need a lot more fans.  Fans outside in Florida will create a cross section of air that will keep mosquitoes away.  It is not so much for the temperature, although it was close to 90 degrees.

Second, it is possible to get stung by so many mosquitoes that you have an allergic reaction. To mosquito bites that led to a wonderful 3 am *asthma attack and hive like welts appeared on parts of my body..... that were covered in clothing and inaccessible to mosquitoes. 

*Not to worry though, as a lifelong asthmatic I had my rescue and daily use inhalers.  All that happened was I woke up, used them, made myself a cup of tea, watched RRR while my body relaxed, and my breathing returned to normal*

Third, and most important, I learned that maybe I just stay inside and give out candy next year.

"So Balls", you say, "what happened on the show?"

Right you are Dear Reader, keeping me on track!  On to the show!

TUESDAY NOVEMBER 1ST

On Tuesday we had Pam Lahoud (Twitter | @SQLGoddess) Principal Program Manager from the Azure SQL Virtual Machine team as our special guest.  Pam talked with us about some of the really cool announcements they have coming up at the PASS Summit. 

We also talked about the IOPs advancements that have been made and are coming to Azure SQL Virtual Machines!!  I wore a Spider-man costume.  Our good friend Dan Taylor (Twitter | @DBABulldog) guest hosted for Andres Padilla (Twitter | @NodeStreamio) as he will be out for the next few Tuesday shows.  Our topic was a spooky topic for Halloween, technology fails!  We had some great stories talking about epic failures, how we recover, stay calm, and most importantly learn from failure. 

Speaking of failure, I was disqualified! AGAIN! Neeraj Jhaveri (Twitter | @Neeraj_Jhaveri) & Josh Luedeman (Twitter | @JoshLuedeman) fought for the win.  Neeraj won the show!  Congratulations Neeraj!!  Neeraj will be the host and pick the topic for our show on Tuesday.

THURSDAY NOVEMBER 3RD

On our Thursday show we had 5 time Microsoft Data Platform MVP Matt Gordon (Twitter | @SQLatSpeed) on our Community Round Table.

We discussed Matt's adventures as a race car driver, his new book Pro Database Migration to Azure: Data Modernization for the Enterprise, and some of his favorite community content.  

Here are the links that we covered:

Neeraj

• TIME's 20 Most Successful Technology Failures of All Time | Time  by LISA EADICICCO , MATT PECKHAM , JOHN PATRICK PULLEN AND ALEX FITZPATRICK Twitter @mattpeckham, @LisaEadicicco, @jppullen

Bradley

• Resurfaced tale details how Toy Story 2 was saved after being deleted – twice  by Ellie Harrison Twitter @Ellie_Harrison

Josh

• It's Time to Go Passwordless - Here's How  by Joey D'Antoni Twitter @jdanton

Andres

• Demystifying Machine Learning for Industrial IoT applications  by Jomit Vahela Twitter @jomit

Matt

• Converting Azure UTC DateTime to User Defined Locale and DateTime  by Jamie Maguire Twitter @jamie_maguire1

Neeraj

• The biggest technology failures of 2020  Antonio Regalado Twitter @antonioregalado

Bradley

• SQLskills SQL101: Dealing with SQL Server corruption by Paul Randal Twitter @PaulRandal

Josh

• T-SQL Tuesday #148: Just Keep Swimming by Matt Gordon Twitter @sqlatspeed

Andres

• Taking Azure Arc and Kubernetes to the Edge!  by Jason Farmer

Neeraj

• The 10 Biggest 21st Century Tech Failures by Katie Rees Twitter @Vocal_Creators

Matt

• Log Shipping - Pre-Stage Database backups with dbatools  by Jess Pomfret Twitter @jpomfret

Bradley

• Using Azure Site Recovery for VM DR, and a SQL Managed Instance Failover Group by Denny Cherry Twitter @MrDenny

Josh

• GitHub for Ben Wilkinson by Ben Wilkinson Twitter @brwilkinson

Andres

• IoT Edge v1.1 EoL: What does that mean for me?  by Ian Banham

Matt

• SQLServerFast By Hugo by Twitter @hugo_kornelis

A big shout out with a lot of love to Hugo!

WRAP UP

Another week is spread out before us, and it looks to be a really great one.  We hope that you have a wonderful week.  Don't forget our shows are live on Tuesday & Thursday this week at our Tales from the Field Youtube channel at 1 pm EST.

We hope to see you there.  As always Dear Reader, thank you for stopping by.

Thanks,

Brad

Tales From The Field Weekly Wrap Up for the Week of 10-24-2022

 

Hello Dear Reader! This past week was an extremely fun time over at the Tales From The Field show!  Fall is here, the leaves change and fall in Florida very quickly, & today is Halloween!!!  Halloween is my favorite holiday of the year.  It is also my daughter's birthday, which makes it extra special!

This is my favorite holiday because everyone can participate in the holiday, the cost to celebrate is low, & everyone is there to give freely.  We will be giving out candy bags, and the house is decorated in a Nightmare Before Christmas theme!  

Decorated while I listened to Wrexham AFC streaming in my earbuds.  Nothing better than listening to Mark Griffiths (Twitter | @m_griffiths92) talk about the pies or bursting my ear drums as Paul Mullin scores away!

Hopefully all of you will have a fantastic, candy filled, costume wearing day today!

"So Balls", you say, "what happened on the show last week!?!".

Ahh, thank you Dear Reader for keeping me on track!  Off to the recap!

TUESDAY OCTOBER 25TH

We had the great Karen Lopez (Twitter | @DataChick) on the show.  Karen is an 11 time Microsoft Data Platform MVP, a NASA Datanaut, & a Senior Project Manager & Architect at InfoAdvisors.  As the world re-opens and we look at traveling for work and conferences again, we discussed Tips & Tricks as well as #KarensTravelStories. 

Josh hosted the show.  I shared the crazy story of my bachelor party flight to New Orleans, somehow I was disqualified, Andres WON!!  Andres will be the host next Tuesday!!  There was something weird going on about Andres, Josh, and a VENMO payment.... let's just say Dear Reader, I have my suspicions. 

THURSDAY OCTOBER 27TH

We had Chris Ayers (Twitter|@Chris_L_Ayers) join us for the Community Round table on Thursday. 

Chris is a Senior Azure FastTrack Customer Engineer that is DevOps & Developer focused.  Chis is part of the same FastTrack team that Neeraj, Josh, Andres, & myself are all part of. We talked about DevOps Days Tampa Bay 2022 and some of the upcoming presentations and events Chris has planned. 

We covered a ton of great content on the show, here's a summary of the posts:

Neeraj 

a. MY BEST 61 TRAVEL TIPS TO MAKE YOU THE WORLD’S SAVVIEST TRAVELER  by Nomadic Matt Twitter @nomadicmatt 

Bradley 

a. Starting with brand new Azure AD Lifecycle Workflows – Part 1by Pim Jacobs Twitter @PimJacobs89 

Josh 

a. The Points Guy by The Points Guy Twitter @thepointsguy 

Andres 

a. Deriving real-time intelligence about the physical world with Azure Percept and Azure Digital Twins  by Nabeel Muhammad Twitter @abrsazi 

Neeraj 

a. Parallelism in SQL Server Execution Plan by Amhad Yaseen Twitter @AhmadZYaseen 

Bradley 

a. Synapse Delta Lakehouse and Power BI Enterprise Big Data Worked Example. Part 1: Start With the End in Mind  by Rishi Sapra Twitter @rsaprano 

Josh 

a. Tech Conference Travel Tips by Una Kravets Twitter @Una 

Andres 

a. Securing access to Azure Data Lake Gen 2 from Azure Databricks by Nick Hurt Twitter @Nicholas_Hurt  

Neeraj 

a. More Consistent Execution Plan Timings in SQL Server 2022 by Paul White Twitter @SQL_Kiwi 

Bradley 

a. Mastering DP-500: Synapse Serverless SQL and file types – the ultimate guide!  by Nikola Ilic Twitter @DataMozart 

Josh 

a. 16 Short Funny Travel Stories That'll Make You Laugh Out Loud by Jessie Festa Twitter @JessonaJourney 

Andres 

a. Best practices for designing a Microsoft Sentinel or Azure Defender for Cloud workspace by Tiander Turpijn Twitter @TianderTurpijn 

 WRAP IT UP

Ok Dear Reader it's time to land this plane.  Put your tray tables in their upright and locked positions, take small children by the hand, and DON'T FORGET we are live this Tuesday & Thursday at 1 pm EST!  Comment on the stream on any of our Twitter pages, Youtube Show page, or my Linkedin page as we are streaming and your comments will make it onto our show!

As always Dear Reader, thank you for stopping by.

Thanks,

Brad

Tales From The Field Weekly Wrap Up for the Week of 10-17-2022

 Hello Dear Reader!  I hope you had a fantastic weekend.  This weekend we celebrated my parents 50th wedding anniversary, my oldest daughter flew into town for an early birthday, & my oldest son came home from college for all the festivities.  Needless to say it was a SUPER BUSY weekend.  Lots of driving, good times and laughs.  

"So Balls", you say, "super happy for you, but what happened on the show last week!"

Thank you Dear Reader, keeping me on track as always. 

TUESDAY OCTOBER 18TH

We had an amazing week on Tales from the Field.  We kicked off the show with our special guest Jes Schultz (Twitter | @grrl_geek).  Jes is a Sr. Program Manager on the Azure Data Tools & Experiences Product Group.  She had a great opportunity to for those looking to participate in a focus group on the future of the Query Editor for Azure SQL Database.  If you are interested in participating, click here.

We played the hosting game.  Josh Luedeman (Twitter | @JoshLuedeman) couldn't be with us so Hope Foley (Twitter | @hope_foley) graciously filled in for Josh. Neeraj Jhaveri (Twitter | @Neeraj_Jhaveri) hosted.  Our topic was on Interviewing Trick's & Tips.  We discussed great things for people to keep in mind when they are interviewing, and tips we've used along the way.  Not only did Hope fill in for Josh, but she WON!  Josh didn't even show up and he managed to beat Andrés Padilla (Twitter | @Nodestreamio ) and myself.  That's the way it works, and Josh will be host next Tuesday!!! 

THURSDAY OCTOBER 20TH

Thursday was our Community Round table.  Once again, we gathered together.  Josh was with us this time, and we reviewed the great posts that YOU the community put together.

Here's the links from the content covered on the show:

Josh

a. Restore or copy an Azure SQL Database with resource tags by Hugo Calzada Martin

Bradley

a.   Azure Networking: Identify NSGs without NSG Flow Logs and Traffic Analytics configured with Azure Monitor Network Insights by Wim Matthyssen Twitter @wmatthyssen

Neeraj

a. interviewing — Ask a Manager -- all your interview questions answered by Alison Green Twitter @AskAManager

Andres 

a. Demystifying Data Explorer  by Gilles L'Hérault

 Josh

a. Too Many Plans for the Same Query Hash by Eitan Blumin Twitter @EitanBlumin

Bradley

a. Announcing the new Ebsv5 VM sizes offering 2X remote storage performance with NVMe-Public Preview by Priya Shan

Neeraj

a. Steps in the Interview Process: What to Expect | Career Sidekick by Biron Clark Twitter @BironClark

Andres

a. Starting with Azure SQL Edge on Raspberry Pi by Hasan Savran Twitter @SavranWeb

Josh 

a. Azure AD Connect: What to know about In-place Upgrade from version 1.0 to 2.0 ? by Sabrina Kay Twitter @oh_is_sabrina

Bradley

a. Preparing for the SQL PASS Summit by Edwin Sarmiento Twitter @EdwinMSarmiento

Neeraj

a. Top 12 Job Interview Tips and Tricks by Alison Doyle Twitter @AlisonDoyle

Andres

a. 5 Ways to Boost Query Performance with Databricks and Spark by Kash Sabba

WRAP IT UP

Great week last week, and this week is looking really amazing as well.  I hope you will join us on the show.  You can comment on any of our twitter pages where the show will be broadcasts, or on my Linkedin Page, or comment on our YouTube live stream and your comments will make it onto the show!  The show is 1 pm Eastern Time US, on Tuesday's and Thursdays.

Hope to see you there Dear Reader, and as always.  Thank you for stopping by.

Thanks,

Brad

Tales From The Field Weekly Wrap Up for the Week of 10-10-2020

 Hello Dear Reader! We had a big week on Tales From The Field!  We've got some great stuff planned for you this week, but before we get to the Live shows tomorrow 10/18 & 10/20, I wanted to do a quick recap of last week.  

Ignite is always an exciting time, announcements are in the air, and we have truly arrived at what I like to call Fall Conference season.  This is a lot like pumpkin spice season, but technology flavored. ...it still has a lot to do with Starbucks as we are all in line to get coffee.

Ignite returned to an in-person gathering at the Washington State Convention Center for the first time since 2019 when it was in Orlando.  I always love when it is in-person.  Hopefully, we have more in person with a streaming component next year.  It is really impowering to allow the millions at home who cannot attend in person to attend remotely. 

All right enough talk, let's get to the shows!

TUESDAY 10/11 SHOW

Last week was Microsoft Ignite and we kicked off our show with TWO big guests.  We had Niko Negebauer Sr. PM from the Azure SQL Managed Instance Product Group, (Twitter | @NikoNeugebauer) join us on the show!    For years Niko was a Microsoft MVP, contributing to the community as a chapter leader, Presidente of the TUGA in Portugal, a PROLIFIC & amazing blogger.  Presenter at many international conferences, and user groups.

We also had Anna Hoffman, (Twitter| @AnalyticAnna) Sr. PM from the Azure SQL Data Platform join us!  Anna is a Data Scientist, The Host of Data Exposed, the co-host of Something Old Something New which is a series about the math behind data science & how it applies to Azure ML, presenter at International conferences, one of the most recognizable faces in the world of Azure Data. 

I was the host!  Neeraj won!!  We discussed our favorite Ignite experiences and Niko flipped the scripted and asked us questions.  Check it out at the link above.

THURSDAY SHOW

On the Thursday show we had the Community Round table and covered Community & Ignite content all in on location.  Here's a summary of what we covered on the show:

Josh

a.10 for 10: My 10 Favorite SQLPerformance Posts  by Aaron Bertrand Twitter @AaronBertrand

Bradley

a. On the Floor of Microsoft Ignite: Day 1 Announcement Thoughts by Joey D’Antoni Twitter @jdanton

Neeraj

a. Microsoft Ignite 2022: What to Expect from This Year’s Event by Joe Kuehne Twitter @BizTechMagazine

Andrés 

a. Azure IoT Edge Integration with Nvidia Deepstream by Emmanuel Bertrand Twitter @emmanuel_B_V

Josh

a. The Dangers of Dynamic SQL and How to Avoid Them by Rob Farley Twitter @rob_farley

Bradley

a. Microsoft Ignite 2022 – Azure Data Platform Update by Wolfgang Strasser Twitter @wstrasser

Neeraj

a. Ignite 2022- New Features and Updates for Ignite 2022 by  David Allen Twitter @onmsft @davidpaj1978

Andrés 

a. High Performance Real Time Object Detection on Nvidia Jetson Tx2 by Prof. Lee Stott Twitter  @lee_stott

Josh 

        a. Stop Using Production Data for Development by Thomas LaRock Twitter @SQLRockstar

Bradley

a. Azure SQL and Azure SQL Managed Instance - Backup retention polices Loading …  by Paloma Garcia Martin Twitter @PalomaGarcia40

Neeraj

a. Introducing-rankx-in-dax by Marco Russo Twitter @marcorus

Andrés 

a. Microsoft Ignite Big Book of News 

Josh

a. New PowerBI Implementation Guidance by Melissa Coates Twitter @SQLChick

Neeraj

a. Incremental Refresh and Hybrid tables in Power BI: Load Changes Only by Reza Rad Twitter @Rad_Reza

Bradley

a. Introducing assessment tooling for Oracle database migration to Azure SQL and PostgreSQL- Preview  by Neel Ball 

WRAP IT UP & SHOUT OUT 

We love our Sr. Escalation Engineers at Microsoft.  These folks are our hero's and our firefighters.  When you have a big issue, you call and put in a ticket.  These are the folks that come in when that ticket is escalated.  One of the blogs that we featured was by Paloma Garcia Martin and she was so kind to give us another Shout Out on their team blog last week!  

Speaking of, what a GREAT TEAM BLOG!!  It is the Azure Database Support Blog and you should go and check it out!

More guests and more great content to come this week, hope to see you there!  And as always, thank you for stopping by.

Thanks,

Brad