Monthly Archives: November 2018

Counting blessings – from Summit V2.0 and beyond

I have been a regular attendee at PASS Summit for 15 years now. This year (2018) marked my 15th year in a row. It is the 20th year for the summit. In many ways this summit was a significant, special one for me – in my career, personal growth and relationships. It was also a landmark year for the summit – in terms of direction and community. This year carried many gifts with it – summarized as below –

🎁 I published my first book this year. My book is a series of interviews with people in the data community, and is part of the ‘At Work’ series by Apress – that have people in various professions interviewed on their career path. The publishing of my book coincided with books published by the illustrious likes of Bob Ward and Grant Fritchey. The book was well received and I got to autograph several copies of it at Apress booth. SentryOne also kindly purchased 100 copies as giveaways at their booth. I liked the book-writing experience – I enjoy writing and it is my chosen way of expressing myself. I was able to get the affirmation I needed in this regard.
🎁PASS has published stories of people whose lives have changed as a result of attending summit. My own story has its mention here. I was very proud to have been highlighted among several community members.
🎁I joined the bloggers table with several people who are rockstars at what they do. While live blogging was a difficult challenge and one that I need to work harder at, just sitting at the table with so many people was a total honor. I was very proud to have made it here.
🎁 My good friend Jen Mccown published the first every SQL YearBook – this is a compilation of stories from many in the community. It is worth a read.

My sincere thanks to the many people who were part of my book, Jonathan Gennick of Apress, Rachel Siragusa of SentryOne, Jen McCown, PASS HQ and BoD for making this year and this summit a gift laden one for me. Happy Thanksgiving.

 

 

 

T-SQL Tuesday 108 – A poetic summary

tsqltuesday

This is November and T-SQL Tuesday time,
I hope you are ready to read the summary – I am the host and it’s mine.
I’d like to begin by saying thanks to you two –
Adam Machanic and Steve Jones,
to whom this is due.
Thanks for keeping this blog party going,
Thanks for letting us write,
It matters, to many, to bring their thoughts to light!

The topic is what you are learning,
on not just SQL Server, but other things too,
with the data world ever-expanding,
there are more things to learn and do.

Bert Wagner documents how to learn rather than what.
It is useful to know that too, there are many who do not.

Eugene Meidinger talks of learning Power BI,
Knowing how to visualise data is important –
learn it now or you will be left out knowing not why.

SQLKohai talks of ‘can Powershell help out here?’,
Of course it can, in most places, learn it or you will soon disappear!

Andy Levy explains why he wants to learn Postgres on AWS – that sounds tough,
and with MongoDB,DynamoDB,CosmosDB – all the NOSQL stuff!

Shane O Neill likes to learn something called Pester,
Know it and you write better tests for powershell – an important skill to master!

DBAGooner has something non tech to say,
He talks of going back farming and gardening,
As people desk bound to machines, many times for pay,
that is a brave thought for sure – and is very heartening.

Rob Farley from down under – has Powershell again,
he recommends Excel too to excel in,
they are both foundational gains.

Jeff Mlaker talks of learning Linux and Python,
he explains why he chose Red Hat, the advice is right-on!

Kevin Chant explains learning Linux for a Big Data project,
It helped him get Hadoop running on RedHat and CenTOS and all that!

Jon Shaulis talks of learning Python and how-to,
He’s into analytics, and big data, and machine learning too!

Todd Kleinhans is into virtual reality,
with Oculus Medium and Unreal Engine,
it provides escape and is quite a speciality!

Ken Fisher who is a blogger prolific,
talks of broadening the ‘T part’,with Azure, AWS, Managed instances
and anything specific!

Glenda Gable talks of learning to be more hardware-aware,
and learning about monitoring,
that makes a DBA non-compare!

Jess Pomfret talks about mastering Powershell DSC,
containers and Kubernetes – lets learn it now, shall we?

Meagan Longoria has on her list – presentation skills to master,
her cool talk on visualisation made it to the top talks at PASS summit this year!

Drew Koballa is that rare sysadmin-cum-developer,
he is learning on Developing Azure functions for Restful APIs,
sure sounds terribly wise!

Matt Gordon is doing more with Azure Logic apps and Cognitive Services,
he’s going to teach us more ,
for coordinating workflows – let us wait for his talk to see how they serve us!

Kamil Nowinski talks of PowerBI, Azure Data Factory, Data Bricks and Azure Datawarehouse –
He also explains how you get there, make use of it, be an Azure power-house!

Jason Brimhall is after Powershell too – he adds in knowing MySQL,
keeping skills honed, sharp and true.

Chris Hyde is an awesome BI and Analytics guru,
he wants to learn more of Azure, Python, and Seaborn too!

Sander Stad is into Continues Development/Integration,
He likes Octopus Deploy, and more automation!

Janice likes statistics and data science – she has book recommendations too,
Check it out to see if it is right for you.

SQLZelda and me, we were the last to write,
She wants to learn Docker and Containers,
I want more of R,
our future is bright!

So the summary is here – Azure, MySQL, Powershell, R, Python, Linux and PowerBI,
Learn for your jobs, learn as life goes by,
learning is fun too, lets keep learning until we die!

Thanks for participating!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

T-SQL Tuesday 108 – Learning R

SqlTuesday

I am the proud host of TSQL Tuesday for the month of November 2018.

My call to post entries is here . I wanted to know from community on what are the non sql server technologies they are dabbling in, to keep up with the rapidly changing data world. This is my own humble contribution to the collection.

I am a math/stats graduate. It has been a good amount of time though since I did anything with what I learned in school for this. I never really thought it would be of any use to me career wise. I’ve always loved math, just never found time or opportunities to play with it further, and definitely not in the IT world. Until now. For the past 5 years there has been a great deal of focus on statistics, machine learning and data science – by companies to put their collection of data to better use. Majority of people really do not know more beyond the buzz words, and few companies are doing data science related work in a serious way. But the increased focus has certainly led to many of us digging out what we knew or renewing our interest in math as related to today. I’ve always also wanted to get back into programming – learning languages like C Sharp or .NET seemed the easiest route to go, but I do not want to discard my two decade DBA experience and plunge headlong into becoming a full time programmer with any of that. I wanted something that I could use to play with data. After the SQL Server integration with R came out – learning R seemed most logical to do. I started learning it by brushing off some of the concepts around statistics that I have known a long time, and learning each of those with appropriate R constructs to go with them. I’ve written several blog posts in this regard. I had to stop blogging on this due to some changes in life but plan to get back to it as soon as i can. What I have gained from learning R –
1 Concepts of statistics and how to apply them to real world data
2 Differences in data constructs outside of relational model
3 Difficulties faced by data scientists/R programmers in implementing their models to run consistently (there are shops converting R code to T-SQL and .NET for this reason).
4 How to provide added value as a DBA to R programmers/data scientists who work at your shop by setting up SQL Server to talk to R, setting up R server, processes to run their code and so on.

I highly encourage anyone who is a DBA and has similar interests as me to try this out, you will not regret it!

 

PASS Summit 2018 – Day 1 – 11/7/2018

I am proud and fortunate to be sitting beside stars of the community at the blogging table this year. I will be updating this post with details of the keynote as we go along here…a chilly fall morning in Seattle and day #1 of the PASS Summit. Some highlights of typical day #1 keynotes are announcements about the summit, giving thanks to volunteers/PASSion award announcement and keynote by microsoft. This year’s day 1 keynote is by Rohan Kumar, corporate VP of Azure Data – details here.

8:20 AM: Grant Fritchey, PASS President is up on stage thanking volunteers. Grant is talking of 20 stories selected from community. 19 stories have been posted – new one is ours. Balloting for elections opens today. PASS wouldn’t be here without volunteers. 30,000 data professionals in over 100 countries around the world are part of it. PASSion award winner is the yearly spotlight on an exemplary volunteer. Leader and organizer of local/virtual groups, from Johannesburg, expanded community in Durban, takes many hours to expand and serve community – Michael Johnson of South Africa.

8:30 AM: Rohan Kumar calls himself a ‘sql loving developer’ at heart. It is the 25th anniversary of SQL Server. Azure has helped them understand how customers use products and services better than before. Azure has helped innovate across a hybrid data platform. More than 80% of customers have hybrid data platform. More than 90% of them believe they need it. They are very clear that some things they have will always be on prem but hybrid is largely the way of the future. Customers get to decide what stays private and what moves to the cloud. Consistent experience wherever it is deployed. Customer data can be joined or merged with data across platforms. Along with Tools this makes hybrid data platform very attractive. Hybrid enables comprehensive AI and Analytics. SQL 2008/R2 are reaching end of support in six months. Lots of customers are expecting to upgrade to the cloud – Azure SQL managed instance with migration service and SQL 2017 are two great options to modernize.

  1. Modernizing on prem.
  2. It is expensive to upgrade tier 2 and 3 applications.
  3. Building applications ground up.

Analytics and AI availability on cloud

SQL Server 2019 supports Spark and HDFS, SCala and JAva native support. SQL server has minimal # of bugs. PowerBI is an excellent choice for visualisation and tooling.

1 Mission critical availability and performance – Automated query tuning
2 Security and Compliance – always encrypted with secure enclaves to allow advanced operations on encrypted data
3 Management and development – In database java language support to exent TSQL , Machine learning services in Linux
4 Big Data and Analytics – support for data lakes – data virtualization across Oracle, Teradata, D2 and MongoDb. HDFS  support natively.

CTP 2.0 is being released today. NEw CTP will be released every month.

8:47 AM: Bob Ward and Conor Cunningham take stage for demo. System tables implemented as hekaton tables and no page latch contention, just wow!

8:53 AM: SQL Server 2019 is the hub for integrating data. Support high available sql server inside Kubernates. Can also run Spark for distributed data management. Single node hosting spark, sql – Unified data platform for all your data platform needs. Join data stored in hdfs with data stored on your master instance to gain intelligent insights – scale out architecture in SQL 2019. Azure data studio is a cross platform single pane of glass that manages all sql server, azure/managed instance, notebooks integrated for data scientists.

9:00 AM: Demo 2: Can use tsql as well as spark to create ‘notebooks’ to query data

1 SQL now natively big data queries
2 Apache spark ships with 2019
3  Support for java language

9:00 am: Azure Database Migration service – near zero downtime, migrate at scale, optimize IT infrastructure. Business Critical sku of managed instance is available – local ssds for performance ,significant compute capacity. Storage and compute scale independantly. Azure SQL DB Managed Instances general availability will be on the 1st of December. Recovery happens in record time (same time) no matter ‘what’ happens to your database.

9:09 am: Lindsey Allen showing new features of Azure – high availability. ‘Doesn’t matter what partition key you choose it is never right’. BEfore ‘accelerated database recovery/ADR’

9:20 am: Building cloud native apps with Azure Cosmos DB. Globally distributed, massively scalable and multi model database service. Your app can read and write via cassandra ap. Adding multi master capabilities to cosmos db – single digit milli second latency for both read and writes. Choose strong or eventual consistinecy – five consistency levels – navigating the portal, choosing the one for your account and choosing scale. apps can read and write from any azure region with millisecond latency with cosmosdb and cassandra apis.

9:29 am: Azure SQL Datawarehouse improvements – row level security, workload management, accelerated database recovery, cicd with ssdt.

Partnerships – informatica ipaas, intelligent cloud services, tableau connectors, dell fast track RAs. Azure event hubs for Kafka now available.