Tales From The Field Weekly Wrap Up for the Week of 06-05-2023 Live 360, the Missing Week, & the Pain in the Back

 Hello Dear Reader! Let's address the missing week.  Last week I was really behind due to the move.  We did not have a Monday video and despite my best efforts a blog did not get out.  It is in the draft's, partially written, and my goal is to try to publish it soon. However, other things are taking precedence.

For example, we moved A LOT of stuff. We had a full crew of able bodied kiddos, all recent High School graduates or current college students, and me.  I did my best to keep up with them.  But they are the heroes of the day.

26 foot truck started off empty at the old house and suddenly, and by suddenly I mean realizing that this new couch while cool was so heavy that it took 7 of us to lift it and get it on the truck and I-will-never-do-that-again had a realiztion that next time we would have movers or just sell the couch with the house because the idea of moving that thing can F@%& ALL THE WAY OFF.... Ahem..... as I was saying.... suddenly we were unpacking all of the large items at the new house. 

Thankfully the unpacking process went faster than the loading process, and by faster I mean we are also selling the bed's with the house; so that does it the house, the couch, and the beds, because we are not going up those stairs with everything again NO THAT IDEA CAN F...... Ahem....

Clearly the next move, movers will be employed.  Hopefully, that will not be for quite a bit of time.  There's still a lot of clean up to do.  There is a lot of things to do with the new house as well.  

Pictures to hang, er, re-hang in a more centered way that reflects less the mad-dash to occupy a house but rather the long term goal to live with artwork being less slightly off-kilter.

The next day we all appeared very sore and tired.  Everyone needed coffee before we could leave the house.  As a treat I took everyone to breakfast at the Walt Disney World's Steakhouse 71 inside of the Contemporary Resort. 

I booked this as a last minute thing.  I wanted to thank everyone for all the hard work.  You can see the amazing cast of family and friends as we awaited our table that morning.  The food was AMAZING.  Seriously, seriously, good.  Normally I take pictures.  That's my thing.  We were all so famished we ate with reckless abandon.  I had Walt's Prime Rib Hash with an over easy egg, we had an order of the Seasonal Pancakes for the table for all to split.  They were blueberry with lemon and they were divine. I had a bite of Sue's filet off the Steak and Eggs.  The whole family came away full, happy, and resolving to make it back to Steakhouse 71 for another breakfast and of course steaks!

When Sue and I took the truck back, we had a beautiful site in store.  It had rained on the way there and was starting to become intermittent.  As I hoped in her car to ride back home we looked up and saw a full end to end rainbow.  What a beautiful site, as we drove it actually became a double end to end rainbow and the end seemed to be at the area surrounding our new home.  Not a bad start.

That was last week. This weekend everything started out pretty good.  We were going to clean Saturday and then had plans for Sunday.  Late Saturday I did something wrong and the pain in my back started.  I was down for the majority of Saturday and Sunday as well.  Thankfully I had a muscle relaxer left over from a neck issue.  I remembered that and took it Sunday night before bed.  I'm doing much better today, but other than a really nice family dinner on Sunday.  Not a lot to write about.

This past week the Tales from the Field crew was busy cranking out videos for this week and next week, as well as coordinating some really cool content drops with the Microsoft Fabric PG for later this month.  

Alright, let's get over to that content!

WEDNESDAY 06-07-2023

On Wednesday we released Microsoft Fabric, VS Code, Notebooks, & Spark! Set it up, connect to a Workspace, EDIT, & Upload!! One of the big questions people have is how do I integrate my existing tools with Microsoft Fabric.

In this video I showed how to connect VS Code to your Microsoft Fabric workspace, how to download, modify, and upload a notebook.  If this interests you, I'd love to hear from you!

TUESDAY 06-06-2023

On Tuesday we had our Azure Data Community Round Table!  We started started talking about the weekend and how we wake up feeling sore for a variety of reasons and that Josh Luedeman (Twitter | @JoshLuedeman) has lost 40lbs!!!  WAY TO GO JOSH!!

As always the star of the show is the content:

Neeraj

• Introducing the end-to-end scenarios in Microsoft Fabric  by Ravs Kaur Twitter @Ravskkaur

Bradley

• Parameter Sensitive Plan Optimization, Why?  by Derek Wilson Twitter @thesqlsith

Andres

• Announcing our improved experiment tracking tools in Azure Machine Learning by Ami Patel  

Josh

• Azure SQL DB Private Link / Private Endpoint - Connectivity Troubleshooting  by Sergio Fonseca Twitter @FonsecaSergio  

Neeraj

• AI and Xmind : How to Create A Mind Map with ChatGPT - Xmind: The Most Popular Mind Mapping App on The Planet.  by Jay Twitter @xmind

Bradley

• What’s New in SSDT 17.6: Ledger, Performance, Copilot by Subhojit Basak Twitter @subho4594

Andres

• Understanding ChatGPT Plugins: Benefits, Risks, and Future Developments  by Mary Newhauser  

Josh

• What is Data Factory in Microsoft Fabric  by Reza Rad Twitter @rad_reza

Neeraj

• Thought Leadership: What It Is and How to Master It in 2023  by Margarita Loktionova Twitter @semrush

Bradley

• CREATE AND VERIFY MICROSOFT FABRIC CAPACITY  by Dharmendra Keshari Twitter @Sachit_Keshari

Andres

• Build Intelligent Applications using ChatGPT & Azure Cosmos DB  by Mark Brown Twitter @markjbrown

Josh

• Deploy and run a Azure OpenAI/ChatGPT application on AKS via Bicep  by Paolo Salvatori  

WRAP IT UP

Ok Dear Reader, we've got a video coming your way today.  Neeraj Jhaveri(@Twitter |@Neeraj_Jhaveri) is bringing you Microsoft Fabric Decision Trees, Deciding Which Service to USE!! today!

Tomorrow is our weekly Azue Data Community Round Table featuring content from the community!  If you want to add your content to the list we cover sound off in the comments below.

Wednesday we will have another MS Tech Bits and I hope we will see or interact with you sometime this week.

As always Dear Reader, Thank you for stopping by.

Thanks,

Brad

Tales From The Field Weekly Wrap Up for the Week of 04-24-2023 Steve Martin, Martin Short, & Tacos

 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. 

 Dan walks through both tasks in this video to break down Backup to URL Seperation of duties.

WEDNESDAY 4-26-2023

On Wednesday I went in a different direction.  I had read a blog recently on how to pass a data frame to an Azure OpenAI model so you could ask questions about the data frame.  We had featured it in our Azure Data Community Round Table two weeks ago.  The blog was Make data more human with Azure OpenAI and Azure SQL by Valentina Alto (Twitter | @AltoValentina)

In this video Use OpenAI, SQL Managed Instance, Python, and VSCode to UNLOCK INSIGHTS About YOUR Data!!!, I walked through how to make this work using a data fram from a Domestic Box Office movie data table I had in a database. This was a lot of fun to walk through and the reception to this video has been really nice.

TUESDAY 4-252023

Of courese on Tuesday we had our Azure Data Community Round Table where we feature your content and it is always the star of the show. 

Here is the content coverd on the show in order of appearance:

Dan

• One Way to Provision an Azure Key Vault by Andy Leonard Twitter @AndyLeonard

Bradley

• Moving the SSISDB Catalog on a new SQL Server instance by Rajendra Gupta via SQLShack Twitter    @rajendragupta16 via @SQLShack

Andres

• Analysing Data with ChatGPT (Data Analysis and ML )  by Jesiel (JCharis) Emmanuel Agbemabiase  Twitter @JCharisTech

Josh

• Use ChatGPT to see multiple perspectives. An example: ORMs and database code  by Kendra Little  Twitter @Kendra_Little

Dan

• Troubleshooting Azure Data Studio by Deborah Melkin Twitter @dgmelkin

Andres

• MLOps on Databricks: A How-To Guide  by Rafi Kurlansik Twitter @kurlare

Bradley

• Data API builder – Introduction by Davide Mauri Twitter  @mauridb

Josh

• How to use the new dynamic format strings for measures in Power BI  by Meagan Longoria Twitter @MMarie

Dan

• PostgreSQL for the SQL Server DBA: The First Four Settings to Check  by Ryan Booz Twitter @ryanbooz

Bradley

• ChatGPT blew my mind with this Power BI scenario by Adam Saxton via Guy in a Cube Twitter  @awsaxton & @patrickdba via @GuyinaCube w @StephTBruno @shan_gsd

• Call back to Power BI datasets CI/CD (the easy-ish way)  by @StephTBruno & @shan_gsd

Andres

• AutoML Comparison in Databricks VS Azure Machine Learning by Mohammadsaleh Gharehdaghi Twitter @MG_cafe01

Josh

• The Top 10 Features of PostgreSQL Every Developer Should Know by Ajay Patel Twitter @Bond_AJ

WRAP IT UP

Ok Dear Reader!  We have a BIG BIG WEEK!  Not only do we have a video by Josh Luedeman this Monday on how to Set up Windows with Chocolatey for Data Developers in SECONDS!! GIT, WSL 2, PowerShell! and another video by yours truly coming up on Wednesday, but this week is SQL SATURDAY JACKSONVILLE!!

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!

Thansk,

Brad

Tales From The Field Weekly Wrap Up for the Week of 04-17-2023 Jorge, Wrexham AFC, & Guys Night Out

 Hello Dear Reader!  This past week was one I had been looking forward to for quite some time.  A couple of months ago I had started reaching out to my other guy friends.  We all  have busy lives, but we need to take time to spend with one another outside of dinner's with spouses, game nights, or Marvel movies.

Not that those things aren't great, but something that allowed us to just relax.  

Let me back up a bit, I love the podcast The Armchair Expert with Dax Sheppard.  On it they refrenced a study that lead me to this article on How loneliness is killing men.  Which shocked me.

I have this really cool Uncle we all idolized.  He was always taking trips to go golfing, hunting, or fishing with his buddies.  Growing up I thought that was really amazing.  As I got older and had kids, amazing turned into questions.  

How did he find the time to do this?  Shouldn't he be spending this time with his family and kids?  He was a really great Dad and family man, was his life out of balance or did these things matter?

I should have picked up the phone and called him.  I should have asked.  But I never have.  Then my kids got older, and getting their attention and even time with them became more and more scarce.

This lead to another realization.  My buddy Jorge Segarra (Twitter | @SQLChicken) and I were talking.  Jorge is doing the beautiful work of being a stay at home Dad and taking care of his kids.  We were having a great conversation, he was picking up kids from school, they got in the car like a chaos bomb and he said, "I should probably let you go this is going to be too noisy for you".

"I'm good", I replied and we kept the call going.  I've been a single Dad, a divorced single Dad, and a very lucky married man with a great partner.  The chaos of the call reminded me of picking my kids up from school about a decade ago.  We also realized that not many men could talk about some of the issues I faced and he was facing.  We also talked about how men don't talk about these things.  I brought up the podcast and the article.

We talked about the need of having time to go out with friends, re-engergize, and come back in a better head space to be father's and husbands.  For the first time, I understood my Uncle.

That was January.  We started planning.  We would talk more regularly, it had been months since our last phone call.  That needed to change. 

We found a weekend that worked, it took a while.  We set the date.  There were other gentlemen invited who could not make it, but hopefully next time.  It was this past Saturday.  Jorge, Daniel Taylor (Twitter | @DBABulldog), Josh Luedeman (Twitter | @JoshLuedeman), and myself planned a day.

It involved a spa visit for Jorge and myself, a cabbana by the pool for all of us to relax, a nice steak dinner, and watching John Wick 4.  Along the way we listened to Wrexham AFC win PROMOTION and toasted them from afar!!!

The day was perfect and we are all looking forward to the next time.  Long way of saying this, but if you are reading this think of your friends and reach out to them.  It is litterally the best thing you can do for your health.... and theirs.

All right, on to the recap!

MONDAY  4-17-2023

On Monday Neeraj Jhaveri (Twitter | @Neeraj_Jhaveri) and Andres Padilla (Twitter | @nodestreamio) delivered a video on Azure Cost Management!  They have a discussion about different options to save money on a subscription.

They also show you how to use the Azure Price Calculator, Cost management and billing in the Azure Portal, how to set a budget, and how to set cost alearts!  Great stuff!

WEDNESDAY 4-19-2023

On Wednesday my video on Azure SQL Space Management for Azure SQL Database came online.  

This was a really fun video to make based off of a customer conversation and our amazing documentation on the subject.

TUESDAY 4-18-2023

The highlight of the week is always the Azure Data Community Round Table.  Josh, Neeraj, Andres, and myself kicked off a review of those articles that we found to be super helpful from the last week.

Here is the star of the show, the content in the order of appearence on the show:

Neeraj

• The Power of AI for Medical Imaging: 5 Key Applications & Use Cases by Katarzyna Rojewska Twitter @k_rojewska, @DLabsAI

Bradley

• Make data more human with Azure OpenAI and Azure SQL by Valentina Alto Twitter   @AltoValentina

Andres

• Integrating Azure OpenAI and Azure Speech Services to Create a Voice-Enabled Chatbot with Python  by Jiadong Chen Twitter @chen_jd

Josh

• Back home, but still a long way to go by Hugo Kornelis Twitter @hugo_kornelis

Neeraj

• How does AI actually work? by Kristina Bravo Twitter @BravoKristina 

Bradley

• T-SQL STUFF – Taking it to the limit by  John McCormack Twitter @actualjohn

Andres

• Using  MLFlow Recipes to refactor messy notebooks by Jeanne Choo  

Josh

• Master Databricks and Apache Spark Step by Step Video Series by Bryan Cafferky Twitter @BryanCafferky

Neeraj

• Can Data and Analytics Help Save the World? by Troy Hiltbrand Twitter @trohil

Bradley

• Using SQL Alerts to Spot Suspicious Activity in SQL by David Fowler via SQL Server Central Twitter @SQL_Undercover  @SQLServerCentrl

Andres

• Next-Generation Computer Vision Capabilities with Project Florence by Adina Trufinescu Twitter @abiramivina

Josh

• Citus Con Reminder (Keynote was at 12-330 ET/9-1230 PT, EMEA tomorrow 9-1230 CEST) by Citus Con Twitter @CitusCon

WRAP IT UP

We've got another great week planned for you, and we hope you can make the time to join us.  On Monday Daniel Taylor is dropping his first ever MS Tech Bits on how seperation of duties requires Azure Administrators and DBA's to work together in order to backup to utilize backup to URL.

On Tuesday at 1 pm EST we have our Azure Data Community Round Table and on Wednesday I will be droping a video utilizing Azure Open AI to read and collect insights on my Azure SQL Data.

Take care of yourself Dear Reader, and as always Thank You for stopping by.

Thanks,

Brad

Tales From The Field Weekly Wrap Up for the Week of 02-27-2023 & Some Changes

 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.

Out of the Live Shows the most popular thing we do is the Community Round Table, and it is our favorite thing!  We get to talk about you and what you are doing.  We get to shine a light on new voices, wonderful established voices, or voices that you may not be aware.  Each of my cohosts brings an amazing and unique point of view to this endeavor.   I love learning new things or getting new videos to check out thanks to Neeraj Jhaveri (Twitter | @Neeraj_Jhaveri),  Andrés Padilla (Twitter | @nodestreamio), Daniel Taylor (Twitter | @DBABulldog), & Josh Luedeman (Twitter | @JoshLuedeman). 

 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.

Content in order of appearance:

Neeraj

• The Importance of Personal Branding to Career Growth Plus 12 Tips for Branding Success by Jessica H Hernandez Twitter @GreatResume

Bradley

• DataChick's Secure Your Azure SQL Data Challenge By Karen Lopez Twitter @DataChick

Andres

• How To Fix Stream Lag: 5 Reasons You are Lagging by Live Streaming Tech Twitter @tech_streaming

Josh

• Announcing Azure Data Tech Groups v2.0  by Rie Merrit Twitter @IrishSQL & @AzureSQL

Neeraj

• Using OpenAI GPT in Synapse Analytics by Thomas Costers 

Bradley

• Programming Databases with T-SQL for Beginners by Buck Woody & Marisa Mathews Twitter @BuckWoodyMSFT, @AzureSQL

Andres

• Calling REST endpoints from T-SQL by Rob Farley Twitter @rob_farley, @IrishSQL, @AzureSQL

Josh

• Understanding Change Data Capture for Azure SQL Database Part 1 by Greg Low Twitter @greglow

Neeraj

• Personal Branding for Students: 7 Tips You Should Know by Nate Torres

Bradley

• Extracting Data from the AFAS REST API with Azure Data Factory By Koen Verbeeck Twitter @Ko_Ver

Andres

• How I Built A Streaming Analytics App With SQL and Delta Live Tables by Richard Tomlinson Twitter @tomlinsonr

Josh

• SQL Server 2022: Measuring Extended Events Performance Impacts by Jonathan Kehayias Twitter @SQLPoolBoy

WRAP IT UP

This week is a big week Dear Reader. We have technical content dropping this Monday and next Monday.  This Monday we have an Introduction to OpenAI by Andrés & Neeraj!  We have our Tuesday Round Table show featuring maybe your content!?!  

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.

Thanks,

Brad