Tales From The Field Weekly Wrap Up for the Week of 04-03-2023 & Easter

Hello Dear Reader!  Hopefully you had a great weekend.  This weekend was filled with gatherings.  On Saturday we gathered with friends and had a really nice Game Night.... where no games were played and it was just perfect.  

It had been so long since we all gathered that we ate taco's, made some movie plans, watched hockey, and just generally enjoyed one another's company.  The food theme was tacos, my compliments to the many chef's.  Mere descriptions alone will not do it justice but there was homemade taco meat, refried beans, melted cheese, homemade rice & black beans, fresh guacamole, and some of the best chocolate chip cookies ever.

The following day was Easter.  My parents joined Sue, the kiddos, and myself.  Even though the kids are 19, 18, & 13 years old respectively.  Yet, they are never too old for an Easter basket!  When I was over in Wales & London for SQLBits I love to get candy for Easter.  There are so many amazing options to choose from and the fact that it is just slightly different, but oh so delicious, adds an element of wonder and amazement.

Some of my favorite Dad things to do are when we prepare for Christmas or Easter.  I also love some of the little things.  When the kids were small I loved making lunches. Making sure to add cinnamon apple sauce, snack cakes, some type of gummi snacks, making sure they each had their own individualized sandwiches. Serenity's favorite was a peanut butter and sliced bananawith no crust, I prefer the crust on mine.  All of those small things, that they are too big for now.

Lots of wonderful happy memories Dear Reader, the most important thing is to be present in the moment and love the people around you.  Alright, enough reminiscing.  Grab a Reese's Peanut Butter Cup shaped like an Easter Egg because it's time to bounce over to the re-cap!

WEDNESDAY 04-05-2023

On Wednesday we released our latests MS Tech Bits diving into the structures of Heaps and Clustered Indexes.  Why do we have the VS. on the slide?  The default table type in Oracle is a Heap, the default table type in SQL Server is a Clustered Index.  For years therese were the two most dominiant relational database systems and having different default recommendations creates confusions.

 

It's importiant to remember what we've learned from Ted Lasso.  "All people are different people", "Be a goldfish", also that tip about the peanut butter was pretty good and I would recommend the White Chocolatey Wonderful. I digress, all databases are different databases.  Some may be based off of ACID some are not, but indexing structures in SQL Server, PostgreSQL, MySQL, or Oracle are all things you need to understand.

It affect performance and every day functionality.  So we dive into the conceptual structures in this video, demos are coming this week!

TUESDAY 04-04-2023

On Tuesday we had our Azure Data Community Round Table!  The wonderful Daniel Taylor (Twitter | @DBABullDog) was in for Neeraj Jhaveri (Twitter | @Neeraj_Jhaveri), Josh Luedeman (Twitter | @JoshLuedeman), Andres Padillia (Twitter | @nodestreamio), and myself had a great day talking about the AMAZING content created by the Azure Data Community.

No time to waste, here is that wonderful content in the order it was covered on the show:

Dan

• DBA in training: SQL Server high availability options  by Pamela Mooney Twitter @PamelaMooney

Bradley

• T-SQL Tuesday #160: Round-Up  by Damien Jones Twitter  @amazonwebshark

Andres

• Edge AI: From Model Development to Deployment   by Raj Prasanna Ponnuraj

Josh

• Faster training and inference using the Azure Container for PyTorch in Azure ML  by Bea Stollnitz Twitter @beastollnitz

Dan

• [How-To] SSRS migration by Garry Bargsley Twitter @gbargsley

Bradley

• The Kingdom of AdventureWorks Calls for Aid - Asad Khan, Bob Ward, Sanjay Mishra & Buck Woody by  SQLBits,  Asad Khan, Bob Ward, Sanjay Mishra & Buck Woody Twitter @SQLBits, @Bob_Ward, @BuckWoodyMSFT, @AzureSQL 

Andres

• Create AI tracking Drone using DJI Tello  by Murtadha Bazli Tukimat  Twitter @RobotAndCode

Josh

• Single Server to Flexible Server Migration tool is GA in Azure Database for PostgreSQL  by Shriram Muthukrishnan  Twitter @azureDBpostgres

Dan

• How To Learn Microsoft Azure in 2022 by Thomas Maurer Twitter @ThomasMaurer

Bradley

• Power BI datasets CI/CD (the easy-ish way) by Stephanie Bruno Twitter @StephTBruno

Andres

• Amazing Invention-This Drone will change everything by Mark Rober  Twitter @MarkRober

Josh

• GitHub Codespaces for Students and Educators  by Nehemiah Emmanuel  Twitter @devgenix

WRAP IT UP.... AND SQL SATURDAY JACKSONVILLE!!!

This week we have the Community Round Table on Tuesday at 1 pm EST.  Join us to see the Azure Data Community blogs & videos we will be featuring.

On Wednesday we will have our MS Tech Bits, this will be the Demos that accompanied last weeks conceptual ideas about indexes!

SQL Saturday Jacksonville is just under 1 month away!! All of the Tales from the Field crew will be at the event.  Make sure to come to Daniel, Neeraj, & my pre-con A Full Day of DBA Fundamentals.  The full event schedule is LIVE!!

This will be a fun week, we hope you have a great one!  And as always Dear Reader, Thank you for stopping by.

Thanks,

Brad

Tales From The Field Weekly Wrap Up for the Week of 03-27-2023 & MegaCON

Zach's 1st MegaCon 2011

 Hello Dear Reader!  This past week is a blur.  It was a tough week at work.  That sentence is an understatement, but its really all I can say at this point.  Monday sent me for a tail spin.  I was fresh off a weekend relaxing with my wife, planning events with my friends, and thinking things were pretty well set.  Life has a way of suprising you.

We powered through last week, had our Community Round Table, and dropped our new content.  Internally at Tales from the Field we did some Camtasia training, explored some new technology, and started some planning for the next 3 months.  I'm excited about those things.  Before I knew it the weekend was upon us.

12 Years Later MegaCon 2023

I'm really tough to shop for, I hear that a lot around Christmas time.  I don't mean to be difficult, but if I want something I tend to buy it.  Books, collectibles, comics, whiskey, gin, ....I digress.  This year my wife did something exceptionally cool for me.  She bought me things to give me experiences, one of those was ticket's to MegaCON in Orlando.  She bought me floor passes & and extra pass to share.  

I shared mine with my oldest son Zachary.  My first MegaCon ever was with Zachary when he was 7 years old.  When it comes to comic book conventions I've only ever been to two and he was with me at both of them.  He enjoyed this so much, I think this is a must do again next year!

One of the things I've always loved it the effort people put into their costumes, how generous they are with their time, and a willingness to celebrate with others.  That was as true when he was a little kiddo dressed in a Superman t-shirt as it was this year when he was dressed as Eren Yeager this year.

I hope you had a good weekend out there Dear Reader!  On to the wrap up.

WEDNESDAY 03-29-2023

On Wednesday we dropped our MS Tech Bits, Turn SQL to KQL IN SECONDS with Azure Data Explorer.  This video is based off the demo I did with Patrick LeBlanc (Twitter | @PatrickDBA) in our Session at SQLBits (Twitter | @SQLBits).

I love Azure Data Explorer, it is an incredibly powerful service for digesting log data and querying massive data sets and returning results in seconds.  It has so many capabilities and possibilities.  BUT... I don't know KQL and I don't know if I want to learn another language.  Fear not as I show in this video you can use the EXPLAIN statement to translate SQL to KQL that you can then run against your data sets.

I'm hoping this leads to peopel realizing that the bar for entry to this service is low, if you know SQL then you know KQL!

TUESDAY 03-28-2023

On Tuesday I once again teamed up with Josh Luedeman (Twitter | @JoshLuedeman), Andres Padilla (Twitter | @nodestreamio), & Neeraj Jhaveri (Twitter | @neeraj_jhaveri) to review the AMAZING community content that you all produced!  If you missed that make sure to check it out.

The true star of the show is the content produced by the Community.  Here is the content in order that it was covered on the show:

Neeraj

• Multi-Column Distribution for Dedicated SQL pools is now GA! by Mariya Ali Twitter @mariyaali

Bradley

• How to use an Annotation in Azure Data Factory or Azure Synapse Analytics Data Integration Pipeline?  by Alpa Buddhabhatti Twitter  @AlpaB7

Andres

• How to set up a Python virtual environment on Windows by Abhinav Saraswat 

Josh

• Announcing the Release of Azure Data Studio 1.4.2  by Erin Stellato Twitter @erinstellato

Neeraj

• Working with the GPT-4 and ChatGPT models on Azure by Derek Legenzoff Twitter @DerekLegenzoff

Bradley

• What is Visual ChatGPT?   by  Andy Sansom 

Andres

• Spark Monitoring  by Dustin Vannoy Twitter @dustinvannoy

Josh

• Turn your database into an API in minutes with Data API builder for Azure Databases  by Jasmine Greenway Twitter @paladique

Neeraj

• The Importance of SQL Saturdays  by Angela Tidwell Twitter @AngelaTidwell

Bradley

• KQL Series – ingesting data with Azure Data Factory by Hamish Watson Twitter   @TheHybridDBA

Andres

• Eliminate these 11 phrases that ‘make people question your credibility,’ says public speaking expert  by Christina Helena Twitter @christinahelena

Josh

• Azure Podcast - Episode 455 - Azure ML in the Real World  by Azure Podcast Twitter @AzurePodcast

WRAP IT UP

This week we have our Community Round Table on Tuesday where we will once again feature content from you the Azure Data Community!  We will be live at 1 pm EST, but you can always catch us after the broadcast on our YouTube Channel.

Wednesday we will have a video discussing the internals of Heaps, Clustererd Indexes, & Non-Clustered Indexes!

Time to say goodbye until next week.  Hope you have a great week and as always Dear Reader, Thank you for stopping by.

Thanks,

Brad

Tales From The Field Weekly Wrap Up for the Week of 03-20-2023 & Kiddos Growing Up

William, right, 11 years ago the morning of our college tour

 Hello Dear Reader! When I got off the plane from SQLBits I wasn't feeling great.  To be honest, I was a little concerned.  I'm a diabetic asthmatic.  Some people are generally unconcerned when they get a cold, some even feel that way about Covid.  Not I.  

For years when I get a cold they would linger, antibiotics would need to be perscribed, consumed, and then about a month later my voice would return to normal.  I've been very fortunate that my immue system seems to have recieved a kick start in the last few years.  No longer is the need for antibiotics absolute.  

 No longer is a cold a one month sentence of exercise purgatory.  Really, I feel lucky.  Despite feeling awful on Monday & Tuesday, by Friday morning I felt great and sounded like Barry White.  So with me feeling better, my wife very happy with my deep sexy voice, we packed up the car and drove my youngest son William to a campus tour of the University of North Florida. 

It was a really beautiful campus and the tour was fantastic.  William is going to be very happy up there.  I'm familar with UNF thanks to SQL Saturday Jacksonville.  It has been held on their campus since my first trip to the event all the way back in 2011 and SQL Saturday #74.

Seeing the campus from the eyes of a perspective student was amazing.  I'm used to the excitement of Friday morning pre-con's and the buzz in the air as you follow the SQL Saturday signs to the parking garage.

This time it was following the signs to the Campus Tour, taking in the campus, food venues, gym, and different  class rooms.  What an exciting time he is about to embark on!  As if it wasn't enough, father time gave me a solid kick to the feels.  The picture posted above of William and his younger sister finger painting was my Facebook memory.  My phone alerted me that I had a memory, and I clicked on it.  All I could think of was how time flies.  There's no way, when I snapped that picture 11 years ago, that I imagined him getting ready for college.

Alright Dear Reader, let's get to the re-cap.

MS TECH BITS - WEDNESDAY 3-22-2023

My deep voice was in full effect as we took a jump into the Transaction Log.  The Transaction Log is an essential part of SQL Server.  That's an understatement.  That's like saying your lungs are essential.  The Transaction Log is fundemental.  We look at what it stores, how it holds data, how Virtual Log Files work, and a little bit about recovery models.

If you are interested in replicating the demos, I'm keeping them over in my GitHub Repo for SQL Scripts.  The demo envrionment I used for this was a docker container running SQL Server 2022, if you want to know how to set up that environment check out this video.

COMMUNITY ROUND TABLE - TUESDAY 3-21-2023

The Community Round Table featured my sultry deep voice as well as Josh Luedeman (Twitter | @JoshLuedeman), Neeraj Jhaveri (Twitter | @Neeraj_Jhaveri), and Daniel Taylor (Twitter | @DBABulldog).

We did a quick recap of SQLBits talking about the wonderful event, and then we covered the content.  No more delays, let's get to it.  Content in order of appearence on the show:

Neeraj 

Performance Tuning Synapse Dedicated Pools - Understanding the Query Lifecycle by Sarath Sasidharan Twitter @sarathsasidharan2016 

Bradley 

Call to Action for Female Speakers to Submit to EightKB  by Tracy Boggiano Twitter  @TracyBoggiano 

Dan 

SQL: Setting local date and time for a session in Azure SQL Database  by Dr. Greg Low  Twitter @greglow 

Josh 

How To Convert Parquet Files into GeoJson Files and Save it in Data Lake using Synapse Notebooks by Sally Dabbah 

Neeraj 

Creating a custom disaster recovery plan for your Synapse workspace Part 1   by Freddie Santos Twitter @fredguis 

Bradley 

Building, Deploying, Sharing a Remote Jupyter Book in Azure Data Studio by  Steve Hughes  Twitter @DataOnWheels 

Dan 

How I evaluate personal safety at tech conferences  by Eugene Meidinger Twitter @SQLGene 

 

Josh 

Azure Data Factory Global Parameters and Azure Bicep Templates  by Tao Yang Twitter @MrTaoYang 

Neeraj 

My week at SQLBits 2023: Why You Should send your Employees to Conferences by Kay Sauter Twitter @KaySauter 

Bradley 

Connecting Power BI to Azure SQL Database using Private Endpoints  by Andy Cutler Twitter  @MrAndyCutler 

Dan 

Why read committed is the default isolation level, and what to do next  by Kendra Little Twitter @Kendra_Little 

Josh 

Azure Data Factory CI/CD with GitHub Actions  by Olga Molocenco   

 

WRAP IT UP

We did some experiements earlier this month and loved the reception we recieved.  We are working hard over here at Tales From The Field, TFTF, HQ to come up with some additional content for next month.

This week we have our Community Round Table on Tuesday & our MS Tech Bits on Wednesday.  We hope you will join us for them, and if there's anything you would like to see sound off in the comments!  We always love to hear from you Dear Reader.

And as always, Thank You for stopping by!

Thanks,

Brad