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 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

Tales From The Field Weekly Wrap Up for the Week of 02-20-2023

Hello Dear Reader! We had a beautiful weekend here in Florida.  Spring is in the air, mainly because the temperature is ranging between 85 to 90 degrees Fahrenheit.  This has lead to some rather pronounced sneezing on my morning exercise routine.  The type of sneezing that has scared children and small animals.

It was a really nice weekend, enjoying the tale end of February before a busy March.

This was a good time to get some recordings done, have some outings with the Mrs., and meet the gentleman for a morning of golf.   I'm not good at golf, quite terrible actually. It is a good excuse to spend two hours with friends talking about life, family, and generally trading our perspectives on things.

As we say goodbye to Winter and begin to focus on Spring it seemed like last week was indeed the perfect way to send off February with a bang.

Off to the wrap up.

Tuesday 2-21-2023

On Tuesday we had a little bit of Christmas in February with out Elfster show.  Our good friend Lonnye Bower (Twitter | @ilovesql) had the brilliant idea to have a gift exchange!  Andrew Nathan (Twitter | @AndrewNathan05) & Daniel Taylor (Twitter | @DBABulldog) were quick to sound off their excitement and we planned our eventual holiday extravaganza!  

We all were super excited for this.  No technical topics in this show, just a bunch of friends joking around, playing Secret Santa, and opening presents.  If you are looking for some fun and a laugh, please tune in.  This was a really fun time!

Wednesday 2-22-2023

On Wednesday we dropped our latest MS Tech Bits.  These are videos that will cover different Azure technologies and how you can incorporate them.  Neeraj Jhaveri (Twitter | @Neeraj_Jhaveri) & Andrés Padilla (Twitter | @nodestreamio) walk us how to use BICEP templates from our GitHub repository to walk you through deploying Pattern 1 in order to deploy you Azure Synapse Analytics environment.       

This is a great video and it is just the start, personally I'm really looking forward to additions to this series.

Thursday 2-23-2023

On Thursday we had our Community Round Table featuring amazing content by you the Azure Data Community & sometimes great authors from our community at large!

Josh Luedeman (Twitter | @JoshLuedeman) wore his hat from the Tuesday show, and we kicked off reviewing the content our team had seleted for the week.  But you don't want to here me talk about it, here are the links!

Links in order of appearence on the show:

Neeraj

• A complete CI/CD experience for Azure Synapse Link for SQL Server 2022  by Kevin Chant Twitter @kevchant

Bradley

• SQL Transaction Processing and Analytic Performance Price-Performance Testing By William McKnight & Jake Dolezal via gigaom Twitter @gigaom

Andres

• Streamline your Edge AI development and operations with KAN  by Olivier Bloch Twitter @obloch

Josh

• Script to Install the Tools I Use on My Jumpbox by Tracy Boggiano Twitter @TracyBoggiano

Neeraj

• Securing your Synapse environment  by Liliam Leme Twitter @LemeLiliam

Bradley

• Synapse Espresso: Optimize Delta Table performance with Optimize & ZOrder Indexing by Stijn Wynants Twitter @SQLStijn

Andres

• Train your Model in AML, score it in ADX by Adi Eldar

Josh

• Sql-action v2 GitHub Action for Azure SQL Database deployments   by Kevin Chant Twitter @kevchant

Neeraj

• Deploying Azure Bicep Templates Using The Azure CLI  by Chris Pietschmann Twitter @Build5Nines

Bradley

• json_object and json_array Functions SQL Server 2022 Tutorial  By Daniel Calbimonte Twitter @MSSQLTips

Andres

• I Wanna Go Fast!)Performance Optimization Tips & Tricks for Azure Data and App Services  by Marcelo Silva & Victor Santana

Josh

• Using the Dedicated Administrator Connection with SQL Server in a Docker Container  by Joey D'Antoni Twitter @jdanton

WRAP IT UP

We've got a big week planned this week.  Vicky Harp (Twitter | @vickyharp ) Principal Product Group PM Manager will be on the Tuesday show!

On Wednesday I have some MS Tech Bits that will be posted, on Thursday we have the Community Round table featuring data from the Azure Data Community, and it maybe featuring your content!  Let us know if you are writing a blog, producing a video, or doing something noteworthy in the community! 

As always Dear Reader, Thank you for stopping by.

Thanks,

Brad