This past November, Eugene and I attended the 2023 PASS Data Community Summit (aka PASS Summit) in Seattle, while Kevin headed down to Orlando for the Microsoft Live! 360 event in Orlando. Having no remote option this year was fine for us, as it was great to reconnect with our friends and colleagues in the data community, as well as get updates live and in-person from Microsoft on all the new features rolling out. The focus of both conferences was eerily similar and in this episode we discuss our experiences along with a picture of what 2024 will look like. Azure services continue to be a focus and Fabric is included in that space; however, I was surprised at the number of Postgres sessions. In fact, PostGres got a whopping 30 minutes out the 90-minute Microsoft keynote.
AI continued to be peppered in the conversation and Kevin gives us his take on where some of this is going. As a side reference, if you are interested in learning more about large language models, check out this video by Andrej Karpathy.
The show notes for today's episode can be found at Episode 271: PASS Summit 2023 Wrap-Up. Have fun on the SQL Trail!
Moving up the ranks in the holy technology wars is the medallion architecture, and boy are we interested in getting your thoughts. Not since the 2008 Olympics and Michael Phelps' tenth of a second win over Milorad Cavic has there been so much controversy around bronze, silver, and gold.
This episode of the podcast has a genesis with Databricks and the methodology of getting data into a workable form for all the reporting pieces businesses love so much. We discuss our thoughts on the various layers of a medallion architecture and the implementation in Azure delta lake environments.
Have a different take? Let us know!
The show notes for today's episode can be found at Episode 270: Medallion Architecture. Have fun on the SQL Trail!
In this Episode, Carlos talks about managed services and shares some of the benefits of working with an MSP, as well as potential cons.
The term manage services refers to the practice of outsourcing business administration or management responsibilities to the third party. Why would you ever want to outsource these pieces?
Listen in to learn more and see if hiring an MSP would be a good decision for your company.
The show notes for today's episode can be found at Episode 269: Why Do I Need a Managed Service Provider? Have fun on the SQL Trail!
We love hearing from our listeners!!! In this episode, a long-time listener asked about the future of AI in the data platform space. We thought this was a very interesting topic as Microsoft has been including Artificial Intelligence or AI in more and more of its marketing material. In this episode we'll dive into the definition of AI, what features are currently available, how we can leverage those technologies, and where we think this might go in the future. One of the challenges we currently face is all the buzz and excitement around AI. From a data platform vantage point, we started with analytics and training models to analyze the data. Microsoft has suddenly slapped Artificial Intelligence on some of the feature sets and confuses the issue a bit.
We are excited to have Mike Chrestensen from Duke Health as our episode guest to help us sort it all out. Mike has begun leveraging AI in his work and I think he gives some interesting thoughts on how he has used it to help his team go faster. We hope you enjoy the episode. As always, we welcome your feedback and thoughts.
The show notes for today's episode can be found at Episode 268: AI and the Future of the DBA. Have fun on the SQL Trail!
All your data, all your teams—in one place. What am I? If you said Microsoft Fabric, you win! When I interned with Cisco Systems in 2000, I supported a platform called Unified Messaging. At that time, we were talking about getting your email, voice mail, and faxes all in one place. My, how the times have changed.
To a certain extent, the Microsoft Fabric is an extension, or wrapper, of some of the tools we have talked about in other episodes. The central idea is the ability to store your information in a data lake, and then having multiple tools at your disposal to use that data as required by the business. Power BI is the cherry on top - providing the visualizations and access to the source data that the business users like to get their hands on.
In this episode we talk through the architecture and then discuss when organizations might want to adopt Microsoft Fabric. Would you like to hear more about this in a future episode? Let us know and we’ll look to circle back with long time friend of the podcast Jonathan Stewart.
The show notes for today's episode can be found at Episode 267: Microsoft Fabric. Have fun on the SQL Trail!
We're kicking off Season 7 with containers!
Spinning up a VM may not be such a big deal anymore; however, most of us still have to request from another group one and wait. Even waiting on an Azure VM can be somewhat painful. Wouldn't it be nice to forget about setting up another development environment just to test something that isn't going to stick around?
Our guest today is Chuck Bryan, and he talks to us about how he is using containers to support his environments and the flexibility it provides to him in his development.
While the Linux containers used to get lots of love, there haven't been too many feature updates lately as much of the focus is on azure services. What is cool to me is there are tools out there that can help us folks running windows get up and running without having to wait on our infrastructure to upgrade to Windows server 2016--or have Azure spend.
Chuck gives us some insights on how he got started with containers. We discuss what environments might benefit from them--and which ones won't. He also gives us a couple of tips on the best places to get started.
The show notes for today's episode can be found at Episode 266: Working With Containers. Have fun on the SQL Trail!
Compañeros! In May, SQL Data Partners was acquired by Marathon Consulting. There were many moving parts to get this done and we are excited to finally bring this news to the podcast. In this episode we introduce the principles of Marathon Consulting, and we discuss the future of the podcast. Make sure your speakers are adjusted properly when you listen to this episode. If you have any questions or comments, please let us know via LinkedIn—we always look forward to hearing from you.
The show notes for today's episode can be found at Episode 265: WHY and What's Next. Have fun on the SQL Trail!
A backup is only helpful when you can restore the backup. This should not prove to be overly shocking; however, normally we get the satisfaction of taking a backup and feel like all is well. Ideally, we should be testing our backups on some cadence—and it should be more frequent than the annual disaster recovery test. In this episode of the SQL Data Partners Podcast we talk with Chris Marshall, owner of Verified Backups, about how he has solved this problem and how it can benefit your organization. We discuss some of the requirements you’ll need to address in your own testing, and we give some parameters for who might be a good candidate for the service Chris and his team provide.
The show notes and video for today's episode can be found at https://sqldatapartners.com/2023/04/12/episode-264-verified-backups. Have fun on the SQL Trail!
When we couldn’t confirm a guest speaker by recording time, Eugene, Kevin, Amanda, and I decided the show must go on, so we went into the ideas vault and pulled out a couple of listener questions we hadn’t answered. In this episode, we talk about how to create your own documentation, SSMS installs, SOS_Scheduler_Yield and Eugene gives us an update on SQL Bits and the conference crud he picked up along the way.
The show notes and video for today's episode can be found at https://sqldatapartners.com/2023/03/29/episode-263-sql-server-this-n-that. Have fun on the SQL Trail!
Learning new technology can be difficult—especially when it’s a technology in an area you are not familiar with. In this episode, Eugene walks us through some of the challenges he has faced getting started with Azure Synapse. We hope that this episode might be helpful to those trying to learn new features.
The show notes and video for today's episode can be found at https://sqldatapartners.com/2023/03/15/episode-262-learning-azure-synapse-pt-1. Have fun on the SQL Trail!
It would appear Microsoft has run out of words to use for new features/products, so they are just going to recycle existing words for a bit of fun at our expense. In this episode we explore the Azure Data Lakehouse—which is not a data lake, nor a traditional data warehouse and Books Online (BOL) refers to it as Databricks Lakehouse. Luke Moloney walks us through how combining the flexibility of data lake storage with some ACID transaction and data governance gives organizations looking to analyze their data a new option. The hope is the cost to build, store, and analyze data will be easier and more approachable for organizations who don’t want to go with the traditional data warehouse model. This still feels like an Enterprise feature to me but let me know if your organization would be interested in this approach. As always, special thanks to Luke and the folks at Microsoft for making themselves available to us.
The show notes and video for today's episode can be found at https://sqldatapartners.com/2023/03/01/episode-261-the-data-lakehouse. Have fun on the SQL Trail!
We’re back with another SQL Server 2022 feature—Contained Availability Groups. Have you ever failed over to a secondary node and then found a job or login missing? This new Enterprise-only feature aims to solve this problem by ‘containing’ all the objects—master, msdb, AND the availability database all in one group so you can manage everything you need when you have to fail over. Brandon Leach returns after more than 200 episodes to give us the lowdown on this new feature and walk us through where you should start planning your upgrade.
The show notes and video for today's episode can be found at https://sqldatapartners.com/2023/02/15/episode-260-contained-availability-groups. Have fun on the SQL Trail!
We kick off the new year discussing a new feature in SQL Server 2022 called Transact-SQL snapshot backups. Good luck with the Google search on this feature--we know we had fun. 😊 These are not the snapshot backups you were frustrated with in 2005. We talk a little bit about who will be interested in this feature and what scenarios it will come in handy. The hardware vendors seem particularly excited about this future as they can now introduce snapshots without needing a third-party application like Veeam to do that for them. We predict more collaboration between the database administrator and the hardware administrator with this feature. We also get a couple of use case scenarios from the community that we share in this episode. Are you looking forward to using snapshots more effectively in your environment? Please let us know your thoughts!
The show notes and video for this episode can be found at https://sqldatapartners.com/2023/01/18/episode-259-t-sql-snapshot-backups/. Have fun on the SQL Trail!