There are busy times for everyone and if you speak at conferences, the busy times are March,May and November. I am recovering from the early spring rush, and now it’s time to prepare for the late spring one. I’ve been fortunate enough to be accepted to speak at the following regional SQL Saturdays and look forward to speaking and meeting new folks, along with catching up with conference friends: SQL Saturday Raleigh, April 27th Optimizing Power BI, Taming of the Shrew, (Analytics) SQL Saturday Jacksonville, May 5th GDPR, The Buck Stops Here, (data governance) Be a Part of the Solution…
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Thanks to those that attended of the over 1600 registrations for the Microsoft webinar yesterday on the future of the DBA in the Cloud. This was a fun session for me, as I got to demo one of my favorite skill areas since starting at Microsoft- automation of cloud deployments in Azure. Bash’in it Its natural that others would be doing this, but I’m writing all my main scripts in BASH, which prepares the environments, calls the Azure CLI commands and then other scripts, (Power Shell, Json Templates, etc.) from the main “wrapper” script. I’m also deploying, not only the…
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This is the third in a series of product identifications between Oracle and Microsoft to assist those attempting to understand the similarities and differences between these essential parts of any data platform environments. In this post, I’m going to describe the similarities and differences between Microsoft SQL Server Integration Services and Oracle Golden Gate. Hang on, it’s a bit of a bumpy ride. as neither service is out there on its own, (other’s piggy back off of them) and there’s definitely some new products on the Microsoft side that aren’t taken into consideration. The first thing to know is that…
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As I have seen the benefit for having a post on Oracle database vs. SQL Server architecture, let’s move onto the next frontier- High Availability…or what people think is high availability architecture in the two platforms. To RAC or Not to RAC There is a constant rumble among Oracle DBAs- either all-in for Oracle Real Application Cluster, (RAC) or a desire to use it for the tool it was technically intended for. Oracle RAC can be very enticing- complex and feature rich, its the standard for engineered systems, such as Oracle Exadata and even the Oracle Data Appliance, (ODA). Newer…
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There are a lot of DBAs that are expected to manage both Oracle and MSSQL environments. This is only going to become more common as database platforms variations with the introduction of the cloud continue. A database is a database in our management’s world and we’re expected to understand it all. Its not an easy topic, but I’m going to post on it, taking it step by step and hopefully the diagrams will help. Its also not an apple to apple comparison, so hopefully, but starting at the base and working my way into it with as similar as comparisons…
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Yep, still doing a lot of database migrations. Just too many people wanting to migrate their other database platforms over to Azure… I have two customers that have DB2 databases and I know how overwhelming it can be to take on a project like this, so I thought I would go over the high level steps to this project to demonstrate it’s a lot easier than many first may believe. The SQL Server Migration Assistant is your friend and can take a lot of the hardship out of migration projects. The overall steps to the migration are as follows: Questions…
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I’m curious by nature and many have shown interest when I connect Power BI to the SQL Profiler to collect performance information, but if you can do that, what happens when you connect it to the SQL Server Management Studio, (SSMS)? That can seem quite foreign, but if you can connect it to the SQL Profiler, you can connect it to the SSMS. Why you can do this is clearly understood when you begin to look underneath the covers of the PBIX file and the processes that run from your desktop. The PBIX File All Power BI files end with…
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There were two trends in topics that repeatedly came up at RMOUG around women in attendance that I felt deserved a deeper investment of time. As I spend a significant amount of time in a more progressive atmosphere, I find I’m even more aware of them than previously. I hope that my words of support and any advice I offered was helpful to those who sought me out this week. “Be Happy With What You Have” or “You’re Never Satisfied” Trend Numerous conversations touched on the common thread around discomfort with women’s ambition. I honestly believe that most individuals aren’t…
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Using only what you need in Azure is a crucial part of optimizing your environment in the cloud. You find that as attractive as Azure is for the masses, making this change to make sure what you do use is optimal will make it downright irresistible. Many customers, as they are ramping up with Azure Data Factory, (ADF) didn’t worry too much as they built out pipelines, as they could always pause the service at the resource level. In recent weeks this feature has been deprecated and customers may be at a loss as to how to proceed. The best…
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As I live in an RV and travel as part of my work and to attend events, travel has started to figure out that I often fly out of one location and fly back into another. This week will be no different. Since we travel between cities on the weekend, its bound to happen that I leave for a SQL Saturday on a Friday in one city and arrive back in a different city on a Sunday. This Friday I will fly out of New Orleans, LA airport, only to fly in on Sunday to a small airport outside of…
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DevOps deployments and automation have numerous tools at their disposal, but most often, scripting is required. Although I’m a Microsoft Azure fanatic, I am also a strong advocate of Linux and with my two decades on Unix, I strongly prefer BASH over PoSH. I find the maturity of BASH and KSH highly attractive over PoSH and with my experience, I’m simply more skilled with shells native to the Linux OS. Before we get too far in, I know some of the text can be difficult to read and/or you want to copy and paste or you want some of the…
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I learned a long time ago, that the quickest way to do something was to not do it at all. A friend of mine asked me if I could review an update statement that was confounding their group looking for ways to optimize it. The table has, just short of 50 columns, a considerable number of indexes and the column in question, has a datatype set to NVarChar(8), consists of some numbers, combinations of letters and numbers, etc. The process would take 7 ½ hours to run this update, as it parses through 100K rows at a time. There is…
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Cloud is a still a huge buzz word because people are still moving to embrace it. As many companies that are in the cloud, there are still a large percentage of real estate that’s on-premises. As much as I’m now Analytics and AI with Azure, it shouldn’t surprise anyone that I’ve been adopted by a number of those inside Microsoft to assist in the migration of Oracle databases to Azure. There are three primary goals: Move to the cloud and Azure is their cloud choice, so they plan on staying with the Oracle database platform. Migrate current Oracle databases to…
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So Tracy Boggiano told me about the great First Responder kit that Brent Ozar had available to use with sp_Blitz using Power BI desktop for a UI, but that it was really slow to non-responsive as data grew. As this was focused on performance data and also included my new love of Power BI, I asked to take a look at it. Tracy was kind enough to send me a copy of her database and the support files for the responder kit and I finally had time to look into it this week. We won’t discuss how I managed to…
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Its been a busy holiday for me. Tim and I spent the days traveling since the weekend after Christmas until January 2nd moving the RV from California to Texas. I’m not the biggest fan of the Southwest- I just like green and water too much… 🙂 Crushing IT Bias Book The evenings and nights were spent finishing up my book on Women in Technology, called “Crushing the IT Gender Bias” with Apress. I’ve been working on it for over six months in my spare time and it’s surprising just how much it takes to get a book out the door.…
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When I arrived at Microsoft, I knew I would hopefully get to use my Linux skills for more than teaching SQL Server DBAs about Linux and was pleasantly surprised as I began working in Azure to find that, of course, it’s ALL LINUX. After almost six months at the company and coming into the Christmas week, I’m thankful for all the technology I’m working with and what many assume that Microsoft won’t be about- the command line. Azure All the Time As much as I feel GUIs are necessary, I’m happiest at the command line and recommend to all those…
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I just finished cleaning up the example data that I was offered for my own demos and solutions. Working in Education requires you use education data to ensure what you’re presenting resonates with the users you’re working with. Otherwise you just look silly presenting something that makes utterly no sense to the individual you’re hoping to impress. Having been given the gift a large data set from demos and solutions, I quickly took the data in its original form and attempted to use it, “as is” in Power BI. After a less than stellar demonstration, set off by bizarre results…
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Upon joining the Analytics and AI Team at Microsoft to support education, it became quickly apparent that my automation skills were needed more than getting me up to speed on Power BI. My predecessor had built some great solutions, but to be more scalable, it would pay forward in the end for me to do the automation work, knowing I’d be granted a greater understanding of the products in the long run. The task of building out the automation, along with doing it in a way that is sustainable and easily supportable requires extensive research and one of the pieces…