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…
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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 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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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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I just finished teaching an 8 hour pre-con at SQL Saturday Indianapolis on Essential Linux for the DBA. The focus of the class was on what the Microsoft DBA would need to know as more SQL Server environments begin to run on Linux. The obstacles and demands of them will be a bit different than the Oracle crowd, as they may not have the Linux Admin or Unix expertise onsite for support and have to fend for themselves more than I did starting out on Linux. Some folks asked me why I chose to use Docker with the SQL Server…