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.
Tales from the Field is a show hosted by four Microsoft data experts from the Azure FastTrack PG, all of the hosts are engineers on Azure FastTrack helping customers and working with Microsoft Product Groups to improve the customer experience. The hosts of Tales from the field are Bradley Ball, Josh Luedeman, Andrés Padilla, Neeraj Jhaveri, & Daniel Taylor. They produce technical content weekly and hold an Azure Data Community Round Table highlighting blogs, videos, or any other helpful information provided to the community by the creators within community!
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.
