Its almost standard fare to be using Azure Analysis Services with our customer deployments these days. As our customers evolve the value of their data. SSIS integration runtimes were pivotal to this and now that there is Azure Analysis Services, it’s even easier to get started with just a few clicks in the portal interface, (or for me, a simple step in a script… :)) and migrate runtimes to the cloud. One of the biggest challenges for any cloud migration project is performance issues, not due to cloud, but due to technologists attempting to perform tasks as they have on-premises…
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I have a t-shirt that says, “Underestimate me, that’ll be fun” on the front of it. This statement pretty much sums up my life and I continue to both impress and annoy people, which means I’m living up to it. The session evaluations came out for PASS Summit and I was surprised by some of the reviews I received. The opportunity to under estimate you is kind of expected. I’m pretty comfortable with my skills as a presenter, but it is still new to me to not be as well known in the speaking community as I was in the…
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This is my third time attending PASS Summit and second time as a speaker. I applaud the PASS organizers, the community, the volunteers, the sponsors and the attendees for another incredible event. In less than four days, I came home and tried to isolate one defining moment from the event and it was impossible to do so. I love RV life and I thought I’d be just find with customer and life demands delaying my arrival until Tuesday evening, but I found myself missing the regional leadership user group meeting as the president of Denver’s, then I rushed over upon…
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PASS Summit 2018 is the 16th annual WIT luncheon. Many of the men are wearing kilts in support of the women in the SQL community, (it’s a thing here…) there’s a luncheon, there’s special panels and highlight on the women authors and speakers. Women in Tech Speaker The WIT speaker was Lauri Bingham, the Director of Technology Engineering Project Management at T-Mobile. Lauri shared her early life, the challenges her mother went through as a single, working mother without an employment history. She said she made a promise to herself that she’d never be in that position and…
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After a long night in a coma to restore my energy expel for the first day of Summit, (anyone else exhausted already???) I showed up bright eyed and bushy tailed for the second day’s keynote and the blogger table. PASS Time The awesome Wendy Pastrick started us out letting us know what goes on behind the scenes deciding how PASS makes decisions…and then broke into song. She will survive….jus’ saying. Tim Ford let us know that 40% of the attendees to PASS Summit this year are first time attendees. I’ve always been one to collect conference data and I…
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So I made it to PASS Summit 2018. After a flight from an airport with one gate- yes, you heard me right, one gate. No Wi-Fi, no connectivity and four employees at the airport. It was a new level of disconnect. After a number of parties last night, I’m at the bloggers table for the first keynote this morning. The first keynote started with an energized talk from PASS president and friend, Grant Fritchey. It was a gracious discussion about the dedication of those in the community and power of those involved. Keynote #1 The theme is #V20, the newest…
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I’ve had my nose to the grindstone for almost four months now investing my brain in new technology, reinvesting fully in performing technical work and prioritizing it all to ensure that I’ll be successful. I stepped back from many speaking events to make sure my private and professional life would succeed in this transition, but that doesn’t mean I would skip PASS Summit. What I didn’t expect was the event would arrive so quickly and I’d feel like I’m always short of time preparing for it technically or personally! Well, its 4am on Sunday morning before and I’m up, so…
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I’ve been hesitant to post too much on my blog until since the hack, as there were some residual issues after the restoration of the site that took a bit to correct. I’m finally feeling confident enough to start posting on everything I’m doing currently working with Azure and the education customers for Microsoft. One of the powerful tools I’ve been taking advantage of is the Azure Cloud Shell. This cloud tool has the offering option of setting to PowerShell or Bash and I think you know which I chose. Although everything I do will require a PowerShell version in…
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The first of three books that I’ve been working on this year is out! From Melody Zacharias’ “Let Them Finish” series, this is the Stories from the Trenches, a collection of stories about diversity in tech and how to survive and overcome the challenges. The book can be picked up via hardcopy from Amazon and a Kindle version is around the corner, if like me, paper is against your religion. 🙂 I want to thank Rie Irish for recommending me, Melody Zacharias for allowing me, an Oracle girl, to contribute to this book, and Tracy Boggiano, Angela Tidwell, Brian Carrig,…
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The I’ve been busy automating a solution we provide many of our Education customers that I discovered, due to a variety of technical skills, was hindered on using the solution while spending significant time deploying it. New to Azure, I wanted to use templates with a bash script as my first deep dive into auto deployment, but was frustrated with the auto deployment templates “JSon’ing me to death”. I wanted to quickly post about a few tips working with templates and parameter files. JSon Format Checker If you’re like me, you have enough varying syntax formats in your brain…
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My blog was hacked last week, deliberately and maliciously. I was hacked because my lacking knowledge in the area of website management and saved by my control issues as a Database Administrator. It was a valuable lesson to learn in regards to being a woman in technology and new technical skills. If you ask most women, they’ll most likely say that they haven’t had too many difficulties with men harassing them, especially if they’re over 40. In truth, its not that they haven’t, we often become so immune to it, until other women recall their own stories, then suddenly recall…
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FYI- this was the one post I had to restore manually after my blog was hacked a week back. Its intact, but the post may appear a bit different than before, as I copied and pasted from the emailed version that occurs as part of my RSS feed. Enjoy! Azure CLI made me feel right at home after working at Oracle in the Enterprise Manager CLI, (EMCLI) The syntax is simple, powerful and allows an interface to manage Azure infrastructure from the command line, scripting out complex processing that would involve a lot of time in the user interface. I’d…
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Time Flies when you’re having fun or when you’re crazy busy- I’m unsure which is more true. I just completed my first review as an employee at Microsoft and good news! They’re going to keep me. 🙂 I still get a number of questions surrounding my job at Microsoft. Since I worked for Oracle for 2 1/2 years, much of it speaking between customer engagements, many didn’t realize that I started out, and have always been, multi-platform. My first database was a monstrous SQL Server, version 7 and small Oracle and Sybase databases. I have always loved technology. I found…
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Its quite common that the first time you work with a feature in a cloud interface, it can appear so foreign until you’ve done it a few times. If it’s a task that you may not do often or only once, it can be downright painful. It doesn’t matter who the cloud provider is or the application, we all have felt the pain of this type of situation and why some of us even started blogging…:) Until its familiar, it may not feel comfortable and you may not even like how it works. As a newer employee at Microsoft, I’m…
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Tim and I just arrived back in Colorado yesterday and just arrived- as in Grand Junction, Colorado on the western border of Utah. Hauling a 42Ft. 5th wheel means that you make some considerations on how far you can go and how far you want to go. It’s going to be a busy couple of weeks and this is what’s in the plans: Microsoft Education Data Summit I’ll be flying to Las Vegas tomorrow morning to attend and train in Las Vegas with the rest of my technical peers in the education sector of Microsoft. I look forward to these…
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I’ve started to write a series of articles on Simple Talk from Redgate on Linux for the SQL Server DBA. Thanks to Kathi Kellenberger, who came to my pre-con in Indianapolis SQL Saturday and then asked if it was something that I’d be up to doing. The biggest challenge when doing one hour sessions on Linux at SQL Saturdays is that you find out, one hour is just no where, near enough. The eight hour pre-con we get to dig in deeper, actually work through a number of labs and I feel like students leave with a better grasp on…
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There’s a reason that log analytics programs, like Splunk, Data Dog and Sumo Logic are so popular. Even Microsoft has a Log Analytics product, but the important message here is log data is massive and parsing through it to find important information can be a bit of a pain. The second word in Log Analytics IS “analytics”. Due to this, the first thought when faced with the number of logs from many complex Power BI environments that people are building, (multiple data sources, multiple data centers, SSRS, Power BI, etc) was to load the logs into Power BI. I’ve been…
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I get a lot of questions about what it’s like to work remote while living in our 5th wheel. I’ll link this post to danceswithwinnebagos.com, too, so for those asking the same question from that site, it’s a two for one… 🙂 I don’t just break any ol’ rule, I break rules that don’t makes sense and working from an office was one of them. The amount of time lost in a daily commute was something I wasn’t able to accept. I hated open work spaces, which more offices are going to, (my ADHD does NOT thank you for the…