Three years ago today, I walked into Microsoft HQ in Redmond, WA and started my journey with onboarding. After a flurry of directions, presentations and shock at the diverse individuals in the process with me, I returned home and started as the lucky person taking over Patrick LeBlanc’s previous position in a specialized group in the EDU. I always hate starting a new job and this was no different. I had no idea what I was doing, was drinking from the fire hose, (which at Microsoft is always the case with how much is constantly evolving in the technology) and…
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As often as I use the Automatic Workload Repository(AWR) data in my day-to-day job at Microsoft, I think most can imagine how often I’m explaining its value, along with tracing to my Microsoft peeps. Its time to write a post dedicated to the Microsoft crowd who want to understand a bit more about AWR, so hopefully its helpful! What is the Automatic Workload Repository? The Automatic Workload Repository, (AWR) had been around since Oracle 10g and requires the diagnostic and tuning management pack licensing to use all of its features in Oracle’s Enterprise Edition database. Versions before 10.2.0.4 had limited…
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I don’t talk too much about my Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, (ADHD) brain outside of the occasional squirrel joke and more often view it as a super power, but when it is a challenge, I think it’s important to share what we go through. You can’t solve a problem if you don’t know it is one. ADHD and Autism For those that aren’t aware, I was diagnosed with ADHD/on the spectrum for autism back in 2004-2005. Its not that I wasn’t before this, I just grew up in a very rural area. I fully demonstrated traditional traits for a kid…
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This is a 2-part blog post, the first in the series can be found on the Microsoft SQL Server blog here. The recently released SQL Server 2019 on Linux includes several updated features, including replication, support for Microsoft Distributed Transaction Coordinator, and Change Data Capture (CDC) support. If you’re running SQL Server 2017 on Linux, these are great reasons to upgrade to SQL Server 2019 to take advantage of these updates. Microsoft SQL Server 2019 was subjected to significant testing and supported to run on several Linux distribution platforms: Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES), and…
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Woohoo, we’ve made it to the second day of PASS Summit! After an awesome first day running from the keynote, to my first session with Denise McInerney, late for my executive meeting with less than a dozen other attendees with Rohan Kumar and sessions/networking/parties, here we are for the second day of PASS Summit keynote! Info and Awards We started the day with Wendy Pastrick to tell us about the financial status of PASS and she decided to make sure we were awake and serenade us with a lovely song first! Tim Ford was next to talk about what the…
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After a flurry of release announcements at MSIgnite this week, it was time to talk about the technology at a deeper level at PASS Summit. I love this event, which has my undying loyalty due to the sheer amount of technical focus on everything in the Microsoft data platform and of course, was not disappointed with the first day keynote on Wednesday! We started out with a great treat of information before the keynote, just so we were prepared for what was to come in the next couple days…plus bacon! Grant Says Grant Fritchey started the keynote by welcoming all…
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I’m getting ready for SQL Saturday Oregon this weekend, (taking the train up from Eugene to Portland…) but its about time I talked about the exhilarating and exhausting event we call PASS Summit. This year I was lucky enough to be chosen as a speaker and a blogger. Bloggers at the conference get the opportunity to sit in special zones during keynotes and we write about the event. We also get special access to Microsoft PMs, (although I may be the only one who works for Microsoft attending vs. running them… :)) I look forward to all of the blogger…
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A couple weeks back, Oracle and Microsoft announced their cross-cloud partnership. This was wonderful news to me, as I’ve been working on numerous Oracle projects at Microsoft with Azure. The Gist To know that there is now a partnership between the two clouds and that there’s also a large amount of documentation about working between the two clouds is very helpful vs. the amount I’ve been working on based off just my knowledge. Just as anyone appreciates a second set of eyes, I now have two company’s worth! If you missed the announcement and curious what it’s about, Oracle has…
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Hard to believe its been one year, but it was June, 2018 when I joined the unstoppable company known as Microsoft. All-in Analytics I joined, with the expectation that I would leave much of what I had specialized in behind me- Oracle, along with other non-Microsoft database platforms, Linux, optimization and DevOps. I was excited to start my journey in business intelligence. Power BI was already starting to take over the world. I’d noticed the patterns, having only arrived on the BI scene in 2015, it was encompassing a larger percentage of speaker sessions and focus of content on the…
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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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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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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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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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So I’ve finally crawled my way back out of the hole I dug myself in this last month. The house is empty, the 5th wheel is ready for us to move into and I’m now in Redmond, doing my NEO, (New Employee Orientation.) I swear this is all I see in my head every time I hear “NEO” 🙂 D&I Epiphany The first epiphany is that Microsoft, unlike most companies, is really walking the walk when it comes to diversity. The percentage of women and people of color is by far, the largest I’ve ever seen at an on boarding…
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The only thing that stays the same is change…. As the time flies by and the world turns, I often am jarred back to reality when I discover how the little things we do can have a larger impact on the world around us. Flying back from Interop ITX and StarEast conferences last week, I was reminded of this. While reading the latest copy of Wired , I came across a story on D-Tech High School. This is the school that resides on the Oracle headquarters campus, in its own building(s). The story was interviewing different students to discuss how…
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This week I had the opportunity to present at Microsoft’s Pass Summit, which was one of two events I had on my list for this year, (the other was Oracle Open World.) Although I’m still learning about all the events on the Microsoft side, unlike Oracle, where there’s one, massive event in San Francisco each fall, Microsoft has split their annual events into three to focus on each audience. In less than two months, there was MS Ignite in Florida, focused on tomorrow’s technology, IT Dev Connections, geared towards development and then this week, Pass Summit, for the Data Platform…